









































































































































































COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 















A MONEYLESS MAGNAT 





FREDERICK F. SHANNON 

























































A MONEYLESS MAGNATE 


and Other Essays 


, 1 ^ 

BY 

FREDERICK F. SHANNON 


It 

MINISTER OF CENTRAL CHURCH, CHICAGO 


Author of "Sermons for Days We Observe,” "The Soul's 
Atlas,” "The New Personality,” "The 
Country Faith,” etc. 


> 3 

5 


NEW 



YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 




COPYRIGHT, 1923, 

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 




A MONEYLESS MAGNATE. I 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


MAR 30 *23 



© Cl A(596965 



T Zbl 



TO 

MR. and MRS. EDWARD B. BUTLER 

LOVERS OF THE BEAUTIFUL, 
DISCIPLES OF THE TRUE, 

FRIENDS OF HUMANITY, 
SUPPORTERS OF CENTRAL CHURCH. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I A Moneyless Magnate .n 

II Beethoven in the Back Yard .... 31 

III Morning Tourist, Ltd! ...... 52 

IV An Artist in Living 71 

V Bryanism .89 

VI A Letter to u Main Street” . . . . 107 

VII Henry Ward Beecher .127 

VIII Phillips Brooks . . A A A . ... . 157 


/ 









A MONEYLESS MAGNATE 


I 


A Moneyless Magnate 

M Y boyhood memories are redolent of an eve¬ 
ning with H. T. Stanton, the Kentucky poet. 
Unlike many of his poetic brethren, he had the art of 
reading his own productions in a voice and manner 
full of charm. Among the selections he read that 
evening was “The Moneyless Man/’ probably the 
best known of all his poems. I thought, as I sat 
under the rise and fall of his melodious voice, that 
he made a strong case for the man with an empty 
purse; and, within certain limitations, I still think 
so. He took our empty-handed friend into banquet 
halls of light, hung with velvet and trimmings of 
gold, and flashing with mirrors of silver; he led him 
up the aisle of a fashionable church, wherein his rags 
and patches seemed ill at home amid such pomp and 
pride; he gave him a look in the banks, bulging with 
“piles of the glittering ore;” he presented him to the 
Judge, robed “in his dark, flowing gown,” who 
smiled on the strong and frowned on the weak. Al¬ 
ways, no matter where he introduced his dollar-poor 

ii 


12 A Moneyless Magnate 

pilgrim, there was no smile, no pew, no credit, no 
justice—nothing whatever for “the moneyless man.” 
At last, however, when life’s fitful dream was over, 
and blithely, almost gayly, oblivious of ethical con¬ 
siderations— 

“There’s welcome above for— 
a moneyless man” 

Now no sane person, surely, manifests any dispo¬ 
sition to depreciate the value of money. For money 
is not only absolutely necessary, but in some true and 
noble sense a part of the “good things” offered at the 
feast of life. However, one’s quarrel is emphatically 
with the philosophy of life which dominates the 
poem, because, if for no other reason, it is one of 
those subtle, taking half-truths which verge on the 
abyss of falsehood. Schiller’s familiar saying that 
the artist is known by what he omits, belongs to the 
same questionable mental progeny. As a matter of 
fact, no genuine artist is known by what he leaves 
out, but by what he puts in. To omit is, at best, noth¬ 
ing more than negation; to put in is creation. For 
example: Is Raphael known for what he left out of 
his “Sistine Madonna” ? To ask the question ought 
to evoke a sensible answer; certainly a glimpse at 
those two cherubs lifts it beyond the realm of dis¬ 
pute, No: the merest dauber can leave out; only 
an artist can put in the ideas worthy of genius. 


A Moneyless Magnate 13 

Yet, whether in the matter of money or painting 
or morals, the soul of man, as Montaigne long ago 
affirmed, “discharges her passions upon false objects, 
where the true are wanting.” Now the only way to 
dislodge the false is to install the true; but the false¬ 
ness of things, like the poor, is ever with us, and it 
has such an insatiable appetite that it sometimes 
threatens to devour the true altogether, leaving not a 
wrack of the permanent values in the wake of its 
greedy and materialistic triumph. This paper, there¬ 
fore, is the crass confession of “A Moneyless Mag¬ 
nate/ J If either the moneyed or moneyless man de¬ 
nies its major postulate, calling it a paradox and such 
like, he is thoroughly within his verbal rights. Only, 
I would gently remind my pragmatic and easily 
overheated friends, that one of the definitions of a 
paradox reads as follows: “That which in appearance 
or terms is absurd, but yet may be true in fact.” 

1 

To begin with, and speaking as becomes a modest 
man, I own huge blocks of real estate. All of that 
downtown section in New York, between the Brook¬ 
lyn Bridge and Battery Park, is in a special sense 
my own property. The view of it from my study 
window is simply enchanting. There is probably no 
such skyline on earth, no such pile of concrete, stone 
and steel on the planet. Looking out from the south 


14 A Moneyless Magnate 

side of the East River, I find my sky-scrapers in¬ 
variably punctual (except on a foggy day), cordial, 
majestic, awe-inspiring. Had Pericles seen them, he 
would have said that they were built by the gods, not 
by men. They do not savor at all of architectural 
monotony. Each is a law unto itself; many colors 
urge their claims; many shapes dssert their popular¬ 
ity. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature in the 
matter of similarity, if similarity there be, is this: 
Each one seems struggling to be a little higher than 
all the others. For example, when the Municipal 
Building attained a height of 560 feet and 1 inch, the 
Singer Building crawled up to a distance of 612 feet 
and 1 inch. You see, my tall buildings are so jealous 
of their height, that they even claim all the inches due 
them! Of course these cloudy aspirations stirred the 
Woolworth Building into a towering, climbing rage, 
whose wrath never cooled until it reached the dizzy 
height of 750 feet! I am not revealing these family 
secrets in a fault-finding spirit; for I don’t mind the 
ambitions of my lofty steel and stone neighbors. 
They might perhaps achieve more of architectural 
harmony if their heads were all about the same 
height. Still I take satisfaction in their variety, even 
in their rough raggedness and stony jaggedness. 
Nor is their attraction one whit less by night. For 
then my skyscrapers are transformed into illuminated 
cliffs, brilliantly twinkling canyons casting their lumi- 


A Moneyless Magnate 15 

nous loveliness across the shadow-hung river. Then 
also, though a modern, I am suddenly changed into a 
cliff-dweller, living with my ancestors of the dim and 
antique past. 

Now, on analyzing the terms of my ownership in 
these colossal buildings, I affirm them to be most sat¬ 
isfactory. Indeed, after much reflection, I am con¬ 
vinced that my terms are very much better than the 
terms imposed upon their legal owners. For in¬ 
stance : I was not put to the trouble and expense of 
building them. Most obligingly have others planned 
and invested and toiled for me. Furthermore, hav¬ 
ing built them, my generous friends promptly pay the 
taxes on them, keep them in repair, and graciously 
assume all the responsibilities connected with their 
maintenance. So, I am satisfied with my terms of 
ownership; and thus far I have heard no protest 
from those who hold title deeds to the buildings. But 
there is one other item in which I claim to have a 
distinct advantage. The owners, certainly most of 
them, lack my opportunity of appraising the beauty 
of their real estate. Their realty may yield them 
much gold, but if it fails to yield them the dividends 
of beauty as well, of what permanent value is all 
their yield in gold? And 196 Columbia Heights, 
fourth floor, back room, offers the best outlook on 
earth. If you don’t believe it, come in and see for 
yourself! 


16 A Moneyless Magnate 


ii 

Another fraction of my material capital is in the 
great steamship lines. Shipbuilding has a long and 
interesting history. While traveling through Colo¬ 
rado, it was my good fortune to fall in with a capti¬ 
vating young man. Learning that I once lived in 
Pennsylvania, he said that he was reminded of this 
story: A man who went through the Johnstown 
flood, talked about that terrible disaster as long as he 
lived. After dying and entering the New Jerusalem, 
he continued to recite some of the thrilling episodes 
in the tragedy of Johnstown. However, he discov¬ 
ered that among his listeners there was always a ven¬ 
erable, long-bearded gentleman who, after patiently 
hearing the recital, religiously shook his hoary head 
and remarked: “No flood at all.” Naturally, the 
former citizen of Johnstown was considerably piqued 
by this chilling and ever-ready comment of the 
ancient one. So one day he ventured to ask: “Will 
somebody be good enough to tell me the name of the 
man who, every time I recite my story of Johnstown, 
shakes his head and says: ‘No flood at all’?” 
“Why,” answered a voice from the crowd, “that’s 
old Father Noah.” And Noah was the pioneer ship¬ 
builder, a first-hand authority on floods. We must 
go back beyond the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, even 
the Phoenicians themselves, and pay tribute to the 


A Moneyless Magnate 17 

man who built the ark. It is a long journey from the 
twentieth century queen of the seas back to the dug- 
out, the raft, and the log, from the Delaware and the 
Clyde to water-courses whose shore-lines have either 
changed or quite vanished from the earth. In this, 
as in other realms of life and progress, evolution is 
slow but steady and forward-looking. Therefore, as 
I look out and behold my gigantic and graceful 
vessels coming and going, why should I not rejoice in 
my spiritual investments in these stately, floating 
palaces of the deep? They visit every land and peo¬ 
ple; they return laden with commerce, food, gold, 
and gems from the ends of the earth. Why, the sail¬ 
ing of any one of them is enough to shake one to the 
roots of his being, setting the looms of imagination to 
weaving thought-tapestries from invisible threads 
that bind the peoples into one! And mark you: It 
costs me nothing to enjoy this drifting, movable feast 
of beauty. Somebody, of course, has gone to vast 
expense to make it possible. Generations of high and 
brave and courageous souls lie behind it all. What a 
mean, stingy nature one must have not to rise up and 
say: “Thank you, brothers, whoever you are and 
wherever you be, for lending me your brains, your 
hands, your years. Having given me much, let me 
not make it necessary for you to forgive the sin of 
ingratitude and unappreciation.” 

Assessing steamship lines at their supreme values, 


18 A Moneyless Magnate 

I naturally claim a large share in the Bay—a vast 
dimple of silver set in a vaster cheek of beauty. 
Henry Ward Beecher used to say, watching the white 
flocks of gulls breasting the blue: “There go my 
gulls.” I have decided to yield him his claim on the 
gulls and to keep the Bay for myself. Yes; yonder 
go the immortal preacher’s snowy gulls, and yonder, 
too, goes my Bay—always flowing, always going, 
but never gone! Above the Bay, and higher, much 
higher, than the gulls, human birdmen ride in their 
throbbing machines. Sometimes they perform gyro¬ 
scopic feats, drop from great heights and make 
straight for the Brooklyn Bridge, threatening me 
with heart failure in their apparent aim to smash 
into one of its arches. But I have learned that there 
is no use worrying—crossing the bridge before we 
reach it—for with graceful, swanlike motion the 
birdman flyingly dives under the bridge. Thus is my 
apoplectic attack postponed until the daredevil comes 
back again! 

But with all the many-toned life and kaleidoscopic 
scenes along river, bay, and harbor, I mourn the ab¬ 
sence of one of my noblest ships. Above all other 
vessels that have sailed the seven oceans, her blood¬ 
stains are the deepest, the reddest, the most unpar¬ 
donable. Her innocent blood will crimson the seas 
until Time drinks them dry. As Joyce Kilmer, that 
white and brave and lamented soldier-poet, sang, she 


A Moneyless Magnate 19 

did not go forth to battle; she carried friendly men; 
children played about her decks and women sang. 
In this unsuspecting mood, the Lusitania was waylaid 
by inhuman monsters, and sent to her ensanguined 
grave in the deep. Never again shall I see her come, 
as of old, stately, magnificent, triumphant, into this 
hospitable port. But above the unforgetting years, 
above roaring billows and howling tempests, I shall 
hear the accusing voice of this murdered queen of the 
seas: 


“My wrong cries out for vengeance; 

The blow that sent me here 
Was aimed in Hell. My dying scream 
Has reached Jehovah’s ear. 

Not all the seven oceans 
Shall wash away the stain; 

Upon a brow that wears a crown 
I am the brand of Cain. 

When God’s great voice assembles 
The fleet on Judgment day, 

The ghosts of ruined ships will rise 
In sea and strait and bay. 

Though they have lain for ages 
Beneath the changeless flood, 

They shall be white as silver, 

But one—shall be like blood.” 

in 

You may begin to think that my riches are so 
fabulous as to be embarrassing. But let me reassure 


20 A Moneyless Magnate 

you on that score; for the more I try to measure my 
wealth the more I revel in it. Consequently, I am not 
satisfied with the sea only, and the many kinds of 
vessels that traverse its fluent paths. I claim to be, in 
my way, a heavy investor in the railroads of the 
United States. To say nothing of the tremendous 
capital invested, it costs billions every year to operate 
American railways. They represent 230,000 miles of 
steel strung over cities, towns, plains, hills, and val¬ 
leys. Think of it—enough steel to engirdle the 
earth more than thirteen times! I have a friend liv¬ 
ing in New York who invited his father to come on 
from Ohio to visit him. He told his father, who was 
as transparent as noonday and as candid as sunlight, 
that he must make the journey from Ohio on one of 
the best trains. The old gentleman accordingly 
boarded the fast express and was directed to hand¬ 
some quarters by the porter. Soon the conductor 
came in, punched his ticket, and informed him that, 
in case he wished to occupy his present seat, he 
would have to pay something extra. “How much 
extra?” retorted the passenger. “Eighteen dollars,” 
replied the conductor. Now I have already said that 
the old man was frankness personified, the dispenser 
of a Lincolnlike simplicity that smites one blind by its 
splendor. Thus, recovering from his surprise, the 
venerable passenger exclaimed: “Eighteen dollars for 
a little cubby hole like this to spend the night in! 


A Moneyless Magnate 21 

. Why, man, I get only ten dollars a month for an 
eight-room house back in the town where I live. No, 
sir, I’ll have none of your fancy cubby holes at 
eighteen dollars per night.” 

Yet there are many who are glad enough to pay the 
extra fare on these luxurious hotels on wheels, 
palaces that roll and whizz through space at a be¬ 
wildering speed. But before many years, passenger 
trains will be comparatively out of date. We shall 
think no more of traveling through the air than we 
now do of traveling by automobile. Utopian? Why, 
the ox-cart and canoe were once utopian, while the 
steamship, the locomotive, the submarine, and wire¬ 
less waves were perplexingly so. Man has only be¬ 
gun to extract the multiplied secrets hidden away in 
the cosmic storehouse. If nations will come together 
in a federation of brotherhood and mutual coopera¬ 
tion, thus averting the disaster of race extermination 
by war, there is hardly a limit to man’s possible 
mastery of the physical forces. Meantime, I am a 
sharer in these marvelous railroad systems—one of 
the most stupendous engineering and commercial 
achievements in the history of mankind. For a few 
dollars, an investment of billions is offered for my 
use, day and night, year in and year out. And what 
shall I say of our street railways and subways? I 
once rode in a subway train with the president of the 
system. If I am not mistaken, he bought a ticket, 


22 A Moneyless Magnate 

just as I did, walked in and sat down. He may have 
occupied a little more space than I required; but as 
far as I was able to judge, I traveled as fast as he 
did, felt much happier than he looked, and paid only 
five cents into the bargain ! Why, I felt like a culprit. 
There I was, utterly free from public criticism, un¬ 
terrified by lockouts and strikes, gliding along forty 
miles an hour, and all for five copper cents, while the 
man who bore the burden of it all had to pay his own 
fare and also sit alongside of me! Having nothing, 
yet am I beginning to think, with Paul, that I possess 
all things. 


IV 

Nor must I overlook my possessions in our beauti¬ 
ful parks. I love them all, but I love Prospect Park 
supremely. I have set out and grown enough ser- 
monic plants in the Vale of Cashmere, the Great 
Meadow, and the Old Fashioned Flower Garden to 
put several and sundry congregations permanently to 
sleep! Planners and builders of our cities knew that 
the great majority of us could not have either large 
or strikingly attractive gardens and yards. There is 
simply not enough space on this particular part of 
the earth’s surface. There is plenty of room up in 
the atmosphere, if you can manage to live at great 
altitudes; there is plenty of room, also, on the heav¬ 
ing breast of the Atlantic, if you are fond of leading 


A Moneyless Magnate 23 

an aquatic life; but here on the ground there is so 
much blasting, digging, running, tooting, driving, 
yelling, crunching, grinding, jostling, and crowding, 
that yards are almost lost in the chaotic mix-up. 
Therefore, we have these splendid breathing spaces, 
perfumed gardens and timbered tracts, undulating 
swards and lilied ponds, animal haunts and flower 
houses, in our parks. Now I do not own a great 
yard; but I possess what is far grander than any yard 
owned by any millionaire on these two islands; I own 
one of the most beautiful parks on earth. The Bor¬ 
ough of Brooklyn, in the city of New York, says to 
me: “Mr. Shannon, all these roads, walks, lakes, 
trees, birds, and flowers are yours. You will oblige 
us very much by coming in and enjoying them.” 

“But,” some croaker protests, “there is a string 
to that invitation.” “What is it?” I ask. “They 
don’t permit you to take anything away,” he replies. 
Don’t they, indeed? Not being a vandal, I have no 
inclination to haul away the trees, or lead away the 
lions and tigers, or steal the lily pond, or kidnap the 
lakes. Yet I defy the Mayor, the Board of Aider- 
men, the Borough President, and the entire Police 
Department to prevent me from carrying out of 
Prospect.Park the very best things in it! Would you 
like to know what some of those things are? First 
of all, studies in human nature. Old and young, rich 
and poor, good and bad, happy and sad—all are met 


24 A Moneyless Magnate 

together in this fragrant out-of-doors. Second: 
Memories of birds singing at evensong—birds that 
have long since returned to the Summerlands of the 
Unreturning! Years ago I listened to a robin sing¬ 
ing his vesper song to the silvery patter of the falling 
rain. Recalling it now, it seems as vivid and fresh as 
if it were only yesterday. Sitting there on the edge 
of the night in his tree-loft of green, that little min¬ 
strel of God sang into my soul the sense of calm 
breathing out of the Supreme Dawn, brought me 
little winds of peace blowing gently down from the 
tranquil Hills of Morning. And then I bring away 
something else, too. I gather up heartfuls, armfuls 
of loveliness and carry them home with me. No park 
policeman has ever yet objected to that! But this is 
an essential part of that sublime and moneyless barter 
in which we may all profitably engage, improving 
the timely admonition of Sara Teasdale: 

“Life has loveliness to sell, 

All beautiful and splendid things. 

Blue waves whitened on a cliff, 

Soaring fire that sways and sings, 

And children’s faces looking up, 

Holding wonder like a cup. 

Life has loveliness to sell, 

Music like a curve of gold, 

Scent of pine-trees in the rain, 

Eyes that love you, arms that hold, 

And for your spirit’s still delight, 

Holy thoughts that star the night. 


A Moneyless Magnate 25 

Spend all you have for loveliness, 

Buy it and never count the cost; 

For one white singing hour of peace 
Count many a year of strife well lost, 

And for a breath of ecstasy 

Give all you have been, or could be.” 

v 

Moreover, I count myself especially rich in my lur¬ 
ing libraries—public repositories of the learning and 
wisdom of countless ages. If matter is dead mind, 
books are the souls of the dead dressed up in living 
garments of glory. Books are the embodied voices 
of the past crying aloud in the teeming present, in¬ 
struments through which minds, ejected from brain- 
houses fallen to dust, still inspiringly function. 
Books are helpful servants, but autocratic masters, 
and no freeman has the right to be ruled by an auto¬ 
crat. Doctor Hillis told me some years ago that he 
had stopped reading books. I replied : “I am not sur¬ 
prised at that. Does not a man stop eating, after he 
has eaten everything up?” However, I think that my 
dear and noble friend is still able to read a book now 
and then! While I have not stopped reading, I do 
not buy as many books as I once did. One reason is 
this: Either I or my books must move out! There is 
no longer room for all of us. Rather than dispossess 
old friends, it seems easier to invite new ones in for 
a short visit. And this is quite practicable through 


26 A Moneyless Magnate 

my ownership in several libraries. Think of that 
great building on Fifth Avenue, with its more than 
thirteen hundred thousand volumes and pamphlets— 
a library and art gallery under one roof. Do you 
not think old Plato would like to have broken into 
those green literary pastures and ravenously eaten his 
way out? Not for Platos only, but food is there in 
satisfying abundance for ordinary people in pursuit 
of extraordinary aims and ideals, angels that guide us 
out of the humdrum into the divinely enchanting. 
Formerly there was scarcely a limit to the number 
of volumes that a student could take out; at present, 
however, patrons are limited to a definite number. 
Even dearer and nearer are the libraries here at 
home. I have been in the Montague Branch so often 
that I fear my shadow will disfigure the walls. 
Besides the books, there are the weekly, monthly, and 
quarterly reviews from America and foreign coun¬ 
tries. What an absorbing exercise to sit down and 
enjoy (or perhaps quarrel with) the Spectator, the 
Athenaeum, the Edinburgh Review, the Hibbert 
Journal, and numerous other publications. Finally, 
if you are afflicted by a kind of disease—the biblio¬ 
maniac will readily understand!—for rare manu¬ 
scripts and odd volumes, the libraries will also help 
to assuage, if not entirely cure, your malady. At any 
rate, cured or uncured, you will want to repeat “The 
Bibliomaniac’s Prayer,” by Eugene Field. Once, 


A Moneyless Magnate 27 

when Doctor Gunsaulus was undergoing an acute at¬ 
tack of “bibliomania,” the special symptoms of which 
assumed a contagious craving for certain copper¬ 
plates, (one never can tell what extravagant and 
glowing forms the treacherous disease will take!) 
Field wrote this prayer and dedicated it to his beloved 
friend and sorely afflicted victim. The original 
manuscript of the prayer is now the property of the 
University of Chicago Library, having been pre¬ 
sented to it by Doctor Gunsaulus, the text of which 
follows: 

“Keep me, I pray, in wisdom’s way 
That I may truths eternal seek; 

I need protecting care today— 

My purse is light, my flesh is weak. 

So banish from my erring heart 
All baleful appetites and hints 
Of Satan’s fascinating arts, 

Of first editions, and of prints. 

Direct me in some godly walk 

Which leads away from bookish strife, 
That I with pious deed and talk 
May extra-illustrate my life. 

But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee 
To keep me in temptation’s way, 

I humbly crave that I may be 
Most notably beset today. 

Let my temptation be a book 

Which I shall purchase, hold, and keep, 
Whereon when other men shall look, 

They’ll wail to know I got it cheap. 


28 A Moneyless Magnate 

Oh, let it such a volume be 

As in rare copperplates abounds— 

Large paper, tall, and fair to see, 

Uncut, unique, unknown to Lowndes.” 

VI 

Henley speaks of Romney’s work as “something 
which is only almost done.” Still, I must not finish 
this bare outline of my material capital without men¬ 
tioning the “little towns” I own. Country born and 
bred, I love the cities. There is soul-shaking power 
in their terrific energy, their splendor and squalor, 
their righteousness and wickedness, their wealth and 
poverty, their pathos and tragedy. But between the 
cities—the inspirers of the cities, the saviors of the 
cities—are the little towns, villages, and hamlets that 
dot the land from ocean to ocean. Sometimes they 
sit back from the great highways, as a vine-covered 
cottage sits back from the roadside; sometimes they 
lie hidden among the mountains, like precious gems 
waiting to share their beauty with every practiced 
eye; sometimes they nestle along the plains, sweet as 
the golden wheatfields billowing away to the horizon; 
sometimes they kneel upon the banks of a mountain 
river, most of the citizens never having a glimpse of 
their rustic river’s wide and hospitable sea; some¬ 
times they bow in quiet, nun-like valleys, faithfully 
guarded by high hills, over whose peace-crowned 


A Moneyless Magnate 29 

heights discordant voices never sound. But oh! my 
little towns—wherever you be, north, south, east, or 
west—the very thought of you brings me the bread 
of beauty, the wine of hope, the apples of Eden. 
Long ago Emerson suggested that it is embarrassing 
to wake up some morning and discover that some¬ 
body else has expressed your own thought, even 
though it is expressed better than you yourself could 
express it. Nevertheless, I am quite willing to par¬ 
don Hilda Morris for visiting me with such an em¬ 
barrassment in the form of her poem called “The 
Little Towns”: 

“Oh, little town in Arkansas and little town in Maine, 
And little sheltered valley town and hamlet on the 
plain, 

Salem, Jackson, Waukesha, and Brookville, and 
Peru, 

San Mateo, and Irontown, and Lake, and Waterloo, 
Little town we smiled upon and loved for simple 
ways, 

Quiet streets and garden beds and friendly sunlit 
days, 

Out of you the soldiers came, 

Little town of homely name. 

Young and strong and brave with laughter, 

They saw truth and followed after. 

Little town, the birth of them 
Makes you kin to Bethlehem! 

Little town where Jimmy Brown ran the grocery 

store, 


30 A Moneyless Magnate 

Little town where Manuel fished along the shore, 
Where Russian Steve was carpenter, and Sandy Pat 
McQuade 

Worked all day in overalls at his mechanic’s trade. 
Where Allen Perkins practiced law, and John, Judge 
Harper’s son, 

Planned a little house for two that never shall be 
done— 

Little town, you gave them all, 

Rich and poor and great and small, 

Bred them clean and straight and strong, 

Sent them forth to right the wrong. 

Little town, their glorious death 
Makes you kin to Nazareth!” 


II 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 

W HILE passing a certain house, my eyes rested 
upon a statue of Beethoven in the rear of it. 
At first I was keenly aware of the disharmony of the 
thing. Here was one of the immortal names in 
music; and here, also, at the back of the house, and 
in a yard distinguished for nothing save the com¬ 
poser’s head done in stone, was the silent, stony, 
majestic face of one whose very name is synonymous 
for moving melodies. 

As already intimated, my first impression was a 
kind of mental discord, a feeling that the sense of 
fitness had been violated. But I hold that opinion no 
longer. Many times since have I gone by that house; 
each passing has tended to do away with the feeling 
of inappropriateness. Now, remembering the de¬ 
light of seeing Beethoven in his back yard, I go out 
of my way for the pleasurable sensation of resting 
my eyes upon that materialized symphony in stone. 
There he sits, calmly looking out on his surround¬ 
ings. He seems quietly determined to turn them all 
—the ugly and the beautiful, the chords and the dis¬ 
cords—into rolling rhythms of harmony. 

31 


32 A Moneyless Magnate 

It may be that my inward change was wrought by 
the words of a quiet man to whom I unbosomed my 
original repulsion. “Discord!” he exclaimed, with 
scarcely any sign of exclamation in his convincing 
tones. “There’s no discord at all. Beethoven needs 
the back yard; the back yard needs Beethoven; and 
we need both.” Unable to forget the man’s words, 
I have decided to set down some random reflections 
upon Master Beethoven in the back yard. 

i 

“Beethoven needs the back yard.” Well, at any 
rate the master was acquainted with the back yard 
of things long before anybody dreamed of chiseling 
him in stone. His father was a drunkard; his 
mother was the daughter of a cook—which is re¬ 
called, in this connection, just to remind ourselves 
what glorious things proceed from the kitchen; he 
was deaf before middle life; he endured the stupidity 
of a churlish brother. What a delicious story is that 
of his brother calling upon the composer and leaving 
his card worded thus : 

JOHANN VAN BEETHOVEN, 

LAND PROPRIETOR. 

On returning home the musician found the card, 
wrote the following words on the opposite side, and 
sent it back to his pompously stupid kinsman : 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 33 

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, 

BRAIN PROPRIETOR. 

One might indefinitely extend the list of ugly back 
yards through which the mighty genius was doomed 
to pass in his pilgrimage across the years. There 
were jealous teachers; there were designing women; 
there was that scapegrace of a nephew; there were 
kinglets and princelets and—well, so many glorious 
and inglorious obstacles in his way that it is simply 
enchanting to stand at a meaningful historic dis¬ 
tance and see him overleap them. 

On the whole, therefore, I think, with my deep- 
seeing friend, that Beethoven needed the back yard. 
How much did life’s back yard have to do in lending 
the deathless note to his compositions? Having 
asked that question, we are thrust headlong into the 
mystery of human life. Not, if you please, human 
life in its celebrated expressions—not the Beethovens, 
nor the Shakespeares, nor the Lincolns only; but 
worthful, red-souled, clean-motived, high-minded 
human life in its common, everyday, universal might 
and majesty. 

Once I went to minister to a sick woman. There 
were miles and miles of gray stone to travel, remind¬ 
ing one of Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night.” 
The house was not much, but it was artistically tidy, 
immaculate in its cleanliness. Occupied by two 


34 A Moneyless Magnate 

maiden sisters, they had fought with poverty, hard¬ 
ship, and menacing environment the long years 
through. And now one of them was desperately ill. 
But the well one—the one who was still struggling to 
keep the vanishing remainders of their home-life 
together—was not content to have a doctor and her 
own watchful love at her sister’s beck and call, day 
and night. A trained nurse must also draw upon her 
scanty savings. Reminded that perhaps this was an 
unnecessary expense and that there were “rainy 
days” ahead for her, she said: “What are a few dol¬ 
lars to me, after my sister is gone ?” With the going 
of her sister, a part of herself was being passed on 
also—a something which neither few dollars nor 
many could alter in the least. 

^Within that toiling woman’s face there was a 
power of immortal reserve—a splendor, a radiance, 
a Godlikeness—that one could well go far to see, and 
be handsomely overpaid at the end of his journey. 
t What, for example, is “the light of setting suns” to 
the light of love that beamed in her patient eye? 
What is the fragrance of heliotropes to the aroma 
of self-forgetfulness distilled from her heart? What 
is the grandeur of mountain summits to the moral 
height of her unfaltering will? Unacquainted with 
the luxury of self-dispraise, as Wordsworth might 
say, she was so unconsciously and yet so nobly 
planned, that any soul having an appetite for what 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 35 

is finely beautiful could not possibly have missed it 
here in this bloomingly spiritual back yard. 

“But there was nothing unusual in her unselfish¬ 
ness,” the cynic may interpose. “Such cases are very 
common.” And is not the cynic half right? At the 
same time does not all half-rightness disclose the in¬ 
exhaustible wonder of the wholly and holy right ? It 
is even so here. For the unusualness of unselfishness 
could only be truly seen by its absence. Just let the 
world jog along a single day without these common¬ 
place and usual tokens of goodwill and at nightfall 
our planet would be conspicuous by reason of the 
enlarged areas of hell upon it. Therefore, the deadly 
and deadening power of the familiar is to be shunned 
like a plague. The fact is, we have learned to call 
that something genius in people who can paint a 
halo around the brow of the ordinary. Is not this in 
itself sufficient proof that, beyond all cavil, there is 
really no ordinary; everything is extraordinary, as 
every perceptive and receptive nature thrillingly 
knows. It is just our ordinary, hum-drum, no-vision 
of things that makes it possible for us to snub the 
back yard with its commanding Beethoven. 

The reaches of our Lord and Master into this 
prolific realm are, of course, unparalleled. Christ’s 
awareness of the living universe is immense. Any¬ 
where and anytime He throws a window open toward 
the Infinite. It is all the more impressive by the very 


36 A Moneyless Magnate 

economy of the words He employs in reporting His 
world-consciousness. Adjectives are not popular in 
the Master’s vocabulary. He is so perfectly alive 
that He seems fearful lest He should waste a breath 
of His being through a meaningless word. Reality 
pressed so strongly upon the centers of His soul that 
nouns, uncolored and unqualified, are the verbal 
sluiceways through which He pours the tides of 
eternal life. Yet, according to accepted standards, 
did not Jesus spend His earthly career in the back 
yards of the world? This fact, commonplace as a 
matter of history, becomes positively acute with 
wonder and awe for every thoughtful person who 
tries to grasp it. Born in a manger, toiling with His 
hands, teaching by lakeside and in market-place, 
surrounded by a company of unlettered peasants, 
frowned upon by the important and misunderstood 
by the ignorant, forsaken at last by His own and 
crucified by His enemies, the story, in view of its 
deepening, transforming hold on the human heart, 
is almost incredible as it is entirely unimaginable. 
John Stuart Mill is right—only the fact of Jesus can 
account for the story of Jesus. The human mind, 
said Mill, was incapable of inventing it. One might 
as well talk of inventing stars or oceans or mountains 
as of inventing the character, words, and deeds of the 
God-Man! 

And not the least invigorating and uplifting 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 37 

thing about it all is this: He needed the back yard; 
which is just another way of saying that God Him¬ 
self, for any truly humanizing revelation of His 
Godhead, could not avoid the back yard. Personally, 
I have scant sympathy with that theological doggerel 
which pictures God as out in the universe looking for 
Himself, not yet arrived at the point of self-con¬ 
sciousness, a kind of hectic, emaciated ghostly be¬ 
coming, without having fully arrived! That sort of 
thinking advertises the quality of mental milk-and- 
water mushiness some of us are capable of stirring 
up. Of a different grain, however, are those New 
Testament strata of thought upon which the Incarna¬ 
tion immovably rests. “Though He was a Son”— 
yes, the Son, the only Begotten Son—“yet learned 
obedience by the things which He suffered.” And 
what were the things He suffered? Some of them, 
unquestionably, were these: Human dullness, mean¬ 
ness, slander, hatred, jealousy, lying, misunderstand¬ 
ing, misinterpretation. He suffered them all, and 
some of them in the Bethany household. “For even 
His brethren did not believe on Him.” When He 
died on Calvary, His brothers, James and Jude, in 
common with every other mortal, thought that an 
end had been made of Him. More than once, His 
mother undertook to revise His plans, being naturally 
and motheringly proud of such a Son. Verily, the 
New Testament is full of the things He suffered. 


38 A Moneyless Magnate 

Whatever the unfathomed immensities contained in 
the unique and solitary death on Calvary, that was 
not all He suffered. But—in all and through all the 
things He suffered—He learned; and He learned, 
though He was a Son—the Son of God! 

So I infer that there was more than the mere 
human need—awful and profound as that is—of our 
Infinite Beethoven in the back yards of time. If God 
underwent a new experience in the Incarnation, as 
Christian philosophy and revelation lead us to believe, 
then the back yard, and all that it signifies, has taken 
unto itself a value that the human generations can¬ 
not exhaust. What if the back yard has already be¬ 
come a suburb of the New Jerusalem, and we know 
it not ? The final greatness, argues a philosopher, is 
not with the man who alters matter but with the man 
who alters mind. And does not the true altering of 
mind rest with Christ, and Christ alone? It is a 
gigantic task. It will require other ages and other 
worlds than ours for its complete realization. But 
both the ages and the worlds belong to Him. Con¬ 
sidering our own world, it is not always easy to dis¬ 
cern how and where He is altering its mind for the 
best. But He is, just the same. Not without loss— 
great and immeasurable, perhaps irretrievable loss; 
but none the less with gain—deep, golden, and im¬ 
perishable. 

There are more things, truly, in the back yard 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 39 

than the casual observer sees. Oh, yes, the wash is 
there, to be sure! And the rubbish! And the 
croaker! But the clothes are in process of cleansing; 
underneath the rubbish there is the unspeakable mys¬ 
tery of life; at the feet of the croaker blooms the 
crocus, and he sees it not. So I am glad, after all, 
that Beethoven needs the back yard. For one thing, 
his deaf ears may hear better there. Anyway, the 
stars look down upon him by night; the sun lights 
up his forward-looking gaze by day; April rains wash 
his massive cheeks, as if tenderly striving to mingle 
their drops with tears not yet all unwept; playful 
winds whirl about his dead ears, and he looks as if he 
might be listening to harmonies that would “create a 
soul under the ribs of death.” I am grateful that he 
beckons me to come and visit with him betimes. 
Standing in his mute presence, his lips of stone seem 
to be saying: “Who has more obedience than I mas¬ 
ters me, though he should not raise his finger. 
Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of 
spirits.” And then— 

“All suddenly the wind comes soft, 

And Spring is here again; 

And the hawthorn quickens with buds of green, 
And my heart with buds of pain.” 

Yet is there not something poignantly creative in 
these “buds of pain” ? Does not one look with other, 


40 A Moneyless Magnate 

deeper eyes upon the groaning, travailing universe ? 
Even groaning within ourselves, do we not already 
have the “first-fruits of the Spirit” ? If so, then the 
crimson buds of pain are unrolling into spiritual 
buds of green! Wherefore, we shall make no terms 
with Giant Despair and his obstreperous myrmidons. 
Rather, we shall go on our way in quietness and 
hope, reinterpreting the pilgrim-rune of David Gray¬ 
son : “I am living deep again.” 

ii 

“The back yard needs Beethoven.” That was the 
second idea flashed out by my unassuming monitor. 
Just what he meant by it, or all that he meant, I do 
not pretend to understand. But it is one of those 
cryptic sayings which lend themselves to various 
interpretations. 

Did he mean that there is a kind of drab, monot¬ 
onous variety in the life of the back yard that needs 
to be awakened to something higher by the breath of 
the artistic? If he did, my answer was ready. 
“What!” I should have exclaimed. “Do you mean 
to say that here, close to the heart of things, there is 
any need whatever of art? Look at Mother Nature 
waking her children up! Is it not a sight for gods 
and men to see then scrambling out of their wintry 
sleep? There is that dandelion this moment thrust¬ 
ing its saffron bonnet through the soil; there is that 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 41 

dream-haunted hedge, alive with a million buds, fair¬ 
ly opening their green eyes upon the April-colored 
world; here is this emerald-streaked carpet of grass, 
daily unrolling its velvety splendor in patterns of 
soothing, nutritious greenness; there is that lazy 
worm, capable of losing both its head and tail and 
then uncomplainingly growing each again, as if 
worm-surgery were foreordained to keep human 
surgery on the brink of despair. And then—look! 
quick! There goes the first bluebird, like a winged 
flower dipped in vats of heavenly blue! What is art, 
if you please, to all this ?” 

From the harvest of his quiet eye, my friend 
seemed to say: “Nature can only come to its deeper 
self through the aid of the human. Apart from 
Beethoven, how long would it take your flowers and 
worms and bluebirds to arrange themselves into a 
Ninth Symphony?” 

He was getting me into the deep waters of 
thought, beyond all question; so deep, indeed, that I 
had no mind to follow him just then. Like a bare¬ 
foot boy with his first Maytide vision of the old 
swimming hole, I, too, was whooping things up in 
the quivering out-of-doors. For who dares to say 
that there is no excitement in watching the brown, 
wintry earth turn green before our very eyes? Who 
is willing to confess that there is no emotion whatever 
in considering the marvel of unfolding buds? And 


42 A Moneyless Magnate 

who, verily, could behold that feathered miracle 
named the first bluebird in Spring and not fanatically 
believe in God and angels and saints and fairies and 
everything else that is lovely and of good report? 

Still, I am willing to concede, notwithstanding my 
unbridled fanaticism toward prophetic bluebirds and 
evangelical shrubbery, that this matter of the back 
yard’s need of Beethoven cannot be ignored. For 
are not the back yards of the world pathetically in 
need of an interpreter? One can scarcely restrict 
the application of this thought; it is so wide-winged, 
so class-defying, so vastly human in its appeal. 
Plainly, the need of an interpreting, harmony- 
haunted Beethoven is universal. Take my two 
friends of “the cloth”—well-worn cloth, too, very 
black, very long, and very shiny! I saw them for 
the last time as they rounded a curve on the hill-road 
in that long-vanished West Virginia morning. I 
was on my way to my first circuit, a callow youth, 
with all the extra meanings attendant upon callow¬ 
ness. The saving grace of it all is, in the mellow 
light of memory, I was so eager to make the venture 
that I spent a well-nigh sleepless night. Long before 
the morning broke its heart of silver over the Ken¬ 
tucky hills, I was fording the mountain river that 
separates West Virginia and Kentucky. My wagon 
was not hitched to a star, but to an old bay mare, 
driven by a faithful, half-witted servant who lived 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 43 

in the home of my beloved Grandmother Sullivan. 
Within a few hours I reached the railroad station 
and the train that bore me on my way rejoicing. 

It was on this first lap of the journey that, quite 
suddenly, these two veteran scouts, who had already 
guarded the lone outposts of Zion for three or four 
decades, came driving around a bend in the road. 
Their greetings and godspeeds were memorably cor¬ 
dial; their “God bless you, brother!” and “May you 
follow in the footsteps of your noble Grandfather!” 
—these are still soft and vivid notes in the music of 
memory. 

Now, those two noblemen of God probably 
worked their lives away at a yearly average compen¬ 
sation of less than five hundred dollars. One of my 
own appointments having paid me twenty-five cents 
—a shining, silver quarter of a dollar for the year!— 
I rate myself an authority in estimating such bud¬ 
gets! But inasmuch as the problem of keeping soul 
and body together has grown more acute, even for 
ministers, in these latter days, I am setting the 
stipend of those two circuit-riders a trifle high. Yet, 
it is not of their pitiable salary that I am thinking, 
chiefly, at a distance of twenty years. I am think¬ 
ing, rather, of this: They had stuff—genuine, clean- 
through, human Godlike stuff—in them. They were 
big, burly, oaklike, hickory souls that knew how to 
wrestle with the spiritual storms that swept through 


44 A Moneyless Magnate 

those lonely, whispering hills. Up the hollows and 
down the creeks and over the mountain spurs and 
into the schoolhouses and log cabins they carried the 
Good News of God. Fleet-footed couriers were 
they sent straight from the News Bureau of the 
Heavens. They reported what they had seen and 
heard in first editions direct from heart-presses 
mightily moved by the Spirit of God. There was 
considerable crudeness, to be sure; but the down¬ 
right, challenging, smiting, eloquent reality of the 
thing—that is what stabs the human soul wide 
awake! 

But oh! the pathetic incompleteness of their lives. 
There were hungry depths within them forever un¬ 
fed. There were suppressed longings but brokenly 
realized. There were high thoughts, stammeringly 
spoken at best, yet refreshingly original withal. Was 
it because the ears of the speakers lay closer to the 
nature of things than is customary in a more driving 
and mechanical age ? “To believe your own thought, 
to believe that what is true for you in your private 
heart, is true for all men—that is genius.” That, 
also, is one of the shining memory-nuggets I picked 
up during those hill-days. Yet do not the men and 
the saying prove the necessity of an interpreting 
Beethoven in our back yards of the world? Nature 
leaves so many things unsaid; life begins and ends 
with a host of problems unexplained. Look where 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 45 

we will, the interpreter is much in request. We do 
well not to forget the “sky-born music”; we do ill 
if we fail to remember the music that comes from 
behind the sky. 

Yet my friends, who long ago laid their tired 
bodies down within the bosom of those wooded hills, 
are not the only ones requiring an interpreter. In¬ 
deed, these suppressed lives do not argue so insist¬ 
ently, after all, for a clew to the tangled skein of 
human mysteries, as the unfolded, ripened men and 
women of the ages. If Paul could make such apos¬ 
tolic gestures in less than threescore years and ten, 
what might he not accomplish in threescore and a 
million? If Shakespeare could drag into the open 
such ordinarily concealed and yet such extraordi¬ 
narily great thoughts, within less than threescore 
years, what may he not report as he becomes 
geonianly familiar with the Archives of Eternity? 
If Frederick Robertson could think and preach so 
gloriously in less than twoscore years, shall we be¬ 
come foolhardy enough to set any limits to the ser¬ 
mons and expositions he may make after spending 
ten thousand years in the presence of the Original 
Text? If Raphael could paint a Transfiguration 
while yet scarcely removed from the swaddling bands 
of his earthly youth, what may he not achieve in a 
universe whose solar sunsets are relatively blurred 
canvases, knowing that in the spaces there are flam- 


46 A Moneyless Magnate 

ing blue suns as well as flaming red suns—worlds so 
unimaginably colored that our seven prismatic colors 
do not begin to tell the beauty of them? 

Anyway, Beethoven himself needs an interpreter 
even more than the spinner of jazz melodies. And 
was he not grandly sure of finding Him? Equal 
to any music Beethoven ever composed, I think, are 
those last and dying words of his, spoken as he was 
mysteriously moving out of his house with its dead 
ears into his house not made with hands: “I shall 
hear in Heaven “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
neither have entered into the heart of man, the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love Him. 
But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit.” 
I am more than half inclined to wonder if there 
are not blended prophetic and apostolic deeps hidden 
away in these words which can never be entirely 
sounded by the psychologist and the psychoanalyst? 
If the back yard really needs Beethoven, the back 
yard verily has Him! “The sun,” says Bacon, 
“though it passes through dirty places, yet remains 
as pure as before.” I wonder if music, though it 
passes through dull, human ears, remains not only 
as musical as it was before, but obeying what the 
great German was fond of calling the law of spirit¬ 
ual increase in the universe, becomes even more mu¬ 
sical ? Well, anyway, the Infinite Beethoven knows. 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 47 

hi 

“The world needs both.” Without too large a 
generalization as to what is implied by “the world,” 
I prefer to confine the meaning to the speaker and to 
myself. Strikingly minute editions of the world as 
we are, this method offers the advantage of being 
concrete. Human life, being what it is, and in the 
process of an immeasurable becoming, I do not 
hesitate to affirm that all of us need both—Beetho¬ 
ven, who speaks for the ideal, and the back yard, 
which hardly needs to speak for the practical, being 
in itself so loud-toned that we can with difficulty 
miss its meaning. 

Are not most of us inclined to be somewhat impa¬ 
tient with the ideal, with the larger significance inev¬ 
itably attaching to life and things? Particularly is 
this true in a time such as ours, when the planet is 
in a sort of human upheaval, when there is so much 
brawny work to be done, and rather brusquely crowd¬ 
ing us on every side. But does not the very fact 
that there is so much to be done make it all the more 
imperative that we keep perfectly clear the reason 
why so much should be done ? That world-deep why 
hurls us immediately beyond the boundaries of the 
so-called practical. We are at once in the presence 
of Beethoven—of music, of art, of prayer, of faith, 
of hope, of love, of soul, of God. Why, then, 


48 A Moneyless Magnate 

should the millions moil and toil? To build faster 
railways, more efficient banks, larger machine shops, 
taller, sun-hiding skyscrapers, more sanitary cities, 
more convenient houses ? That we may do all these 
and not do enough, is a commonplace of progress, 
ethics, and religion; but that while doing all these we 
may also become dead souls is the spiritual revenge 
which the universe invariably takes upon us. “How 
shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?” 
The question is not simply evangelical; it is cosmic, 
scientific, historic, profoundly human. And the 
answer comes, from a thousand voices, that there 
is no possible escape—not as long as the universe 
bears the semblance of order. Every day I meet 
cultured, successful men who have no more of a 
spiritual roof over their heads than the veriest hobo, 
who boasts not a single physical shingle for his. As 
I view it, the latter is replete with physical and 
human pathos; but the former is black with terrible 
spiritual tragedy. For the physical tramp is sordidly, 
repulsively dead; the spiritual tramp is smoothly, 
subtly, gayly, icily, splendidly, hopelessly dead, 
though unburied. Frequently he is a cynic; under¬ 
neath his fine exterior there is dourness and sourness; 
and 1 modestly submit that a pickled cynic, though 
preserved in a strong brine of gold, can never acquire 
a delicious taste on any planet in the known universe. 

Truly, my friend, we need Beethoven; our human 





Beethoven in the Back Yard 49 

nature must have superhuman nature within, around, 
and underneath it. “It is the province of a great 
poet,” Wordsworth once said to Klopstock, “to raise 
people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs.” 
It were not less truly said of the statesman, the 
Christian preacher and reformer, or indeed of any 
Christian whatsoever. But to lift people at all— 
aye, there’s the rub! If there is so much sheer dead 
weight in any other realm known to avoirdupois, 
average people like ourselves, people whom we meet 
in the stress and press of everyday, seem to be com¬ 
placently unaware of it. 

And yet there is a Lifter! He carries the worlds on 
His shoulders and His sin-smitten, death-wounded 
children in His heart. If the old Greek geometrician 
discovered the principle of the lever, declaring, “Give 
me where to stand, and I will move the world,” our 
Uplifted Beethoven reveals the moral center of God 
and Man, takes His stand upon it, saying: “And I, 
if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
unto Myself.” Thus, while I can see the dead weight 
in the average man, especially as it does not require 
much visualizing power to do that, He senses, even 
from his riven, shuddering hill of red rain, the pos¬ 
sibility of all men being lifted to heights beyond 
which heights there are none—Himself! 

So, I think, we need both—the ideal and the real. 
The problem of life is to keep the two in proper 


50 A Moneyless Magnate 

focus. Our capacity for spilling over on the wrong 
side of each is ever with us in exasperating dimen¬ 
sions. Some want to be hermits and others never 
want to be out of human haunts; some are shriveled- 
up book-worms and others carry brains alive with 
the worms of ignorance; some are riotously social¬ 
istic and others are egocentrically individualistic; 
some want to pray all the time and others want to 
work all the time. And so we go—mis-seeing, mis¬ 
doing, mis-living. Yet the unwithering secret of 
life is the legitimate marriage of these two facts, 
which are deeply one at heart. I once saw a librarian 
have a child expelled from the reading-room of a 
library while the librarian himself kept right on talk¬ 
ing louder than a half dozen children. Thus the 
abyss between theory and practice must be continu¬ 
ously bridged over. But the Bridge-builder has 
come; He has never gone away; He has wisely van¬ 
ished behind the horizons of sense that He may 
more perfectly, universally, and transfiguringly home 
within. That myth of the sibyl and Tarquin the 
Proud is instructive here. Having nine books, she 
offered to sell them to the king. As he refused to 
buy them, she went away and burned three. Then 
she came a second time, demanding as much for the 
six as for the nine. Still the king refused to pur¬ 
chase. The sibyl went away and burned three more., 
Returning with three, she asked as much for them 


Beethoven in the Back Yard 51 

as for the nine. At last the king’s curiosity was 
excited, and he bought the remaining three. And 
well that he did! They contained the destinies of 
the Roman Empire. 

Without a single touch of myth, but with the very 
soul of reality, the destinies of humanity are revealed 
in words as simple as they are sublime, as heartening 
as they are unexplorable, as modern as they are more 
than sixty generations old. They were spoken to 
Thomas, a severely practical man—a man prone to 
linger overmuch in the back yard of being. “Jesus 
saith unto him, I am the way, and the truth, and the 
life: no one cometh unto the Father but by Me.” 
Thomas did not readily understand; but after the 
Light of the World had gone through the apostle’s 
endungeoned parts, the Sun, to recall Bacon’s figure, 
was just as pure as before, while Thomas was in¬ 
finitely cleaner. At least one thinks so, when, eight 
days later, the man of doubt had his gaze lifted from 
the muck and mire and accepted, whole-heartedly, 
the Lordship of that eternity-tuned Beethoven, Who 
was dead and is alive forevermore. 


Ill 


Morning Tourist , Ltd! 

W ELL, what did you see this morning?” 

The question was asked by the wife of the 
Morning Tourist 

“Ask me something easy,” he answered. “I 
have seen so much that my mind is all in a har¬ 
monious whirl.” 

And yet the Tourist was limited in more ways 
than one. He was limited for time, a most impor¬ 
tant element in all true sight-seeing. He was lim¬ 
ited, also, in respect to territory. For it was only 
a nook in the blooming, melodious out-of-doors that 
he had been able to visit. Most of all, as the sequel 
proves, he was limited in the matter of eyes. If he 
had owned a thousand eyes instead of two, he knows 
that something would have managed to escape 
them. So, fully recognizing the handicaps he suf¬ 
fered, here is an attempt to set down a few of the 
Morning Tourist’s observations. 

i 

The first item has to do with what the wise ones 

call the inorganic. Whether they understand all 

52 


Morning Tourist, Ltd! 53 

that might be said about this mysterious realm, I 
shall not tarry to debate. It was the belief of Plato 
that poets utter great and mysterious things which 
they themselves do not understand; it may be even 
so of the savants and the inorganic. But, like the 
poor, the inorganic is ever with us. And with us 
in surpassing wonder, too. For is it not a miracle 
too great to be told to watch this world of soil and 
roots change before our very eyes? Snow covered 
the ground a few weeks ago; the earth was stiff with 
ribs of ice; the razor-like winds shaved one’s face 
with keen edges. Yet behold! The only snow visi¬ 
ble anywhere today is in the white blossoms waving 
in the domes of swaying, wind-rocked trees; there 
is not a sign of frozen stuff in the ground, this busy 
merchantman having bartered away his icy wares 
for tender grasses and flowering shrubs; the wind no 
longer smites—it is soft, wooing, and priestly, bear¬ 
ing a million seeds upon its invisible wings to 
nuptial bowers hidden away in every part of the 
wedded and wedding Springtime. 

Do I believe in miracles? With all my heart! 
As long as snowbanks are lifted into bowers of 
green; as long as icicles are changed into fragrant 
twigs; as long as the wild tunes of March melt into 
the building songs of May, I shall remain an incur¬ 
able believer in miracles, I refuse to be mentally 
and spiritually brow-beaten by polysyllabic terminol- 


54 A Moneyless Magnate 

ogy about inviolable laws and cosmic forces. While 
some people use the big words only, I am highly 
resolved to enjoy the Big Fact also! 

Still keeping close to the inorganic, here is a sight 
worth inscribing upon the tablets of memory. Let 
me illustrate what I mean by something familiar 
in our human world. Some friends came in to see 
the new baby—not mine, I am sorry to say, but 
somebody’s dimpled, wonderful baby! But the little 
creature was asleep. Having slept long enough, it 
was high time the darling was now wide awake and 
engaged in the enchanting business of cooing—busi¬ 
ness, by the way, no honest bachelor can understand 
except through an interpreter. Still the baby slept 
on. Then did I see the Mother bend over that cradle 
and gently call her child back from the Sleeplands 
of Babyhood into our noises. Likewise, have I not 
seen Mother Nature brooding above her ten thousand 
cradles? Putting on her robes of mothering glory, 
she goes mysteriously forth and says: “Get up, Dan¬ 
delion ! Rouse yourself, Tulip! Come out and greet 
the sun, Heliotrope! Wake up, Hyacinth, and 
sprinkle the air with your fragrance!” And do not 
all the floral children know their Mother’s voice? 
Yes; down to the last syllable and tone. A still 
better answer is in the whole wide-verdured world 
named gardens, fields, valleys, and mountains. For 
in Maytime the earth is one vast, many-colored vase 


Morning Tourist, Ltd! 55 

wafting its blended odors up to the Throne of 
God. 

Yet I dare not pass from the inorganic without 
asking a question which fairly haunts me every 
springtime. It is this : Where does the tulip begin to 
get its red or white or yellow ? Is the color concealed 
in the soil, the root, the stamen, the pistil, or where ? 
And when does the color begin to steal into the rose, 
the violet, or the orchid? I asked a gardener this 
question as he spaded up the soil about the roots of 
the rose-bushes. Truly, the look upon his face was a 
study in human botany! But never mind! I am 
slyly resolved on putting the same question—at the 
psychological moment, of course!—to my botanical 
friend, justly renowned for his knowledge of the 
plant world. Only, I am going to couple with my 
question concerning the birth of color in flowers, a 
second one which troubles me not a little. It runs 
somewhat as follows: At what point does the fra¬ 
grance get spilled into the jar of a hyacinth? There 
is, no doubt, a scientific answer to these questions; 
but even after they have been answered in the latest 
word of botanical technique, I somehow feel that I 
shall go right on from Spring to Spring, asking my 
foolish questions concerning the origin of color and 
fragrance in flowers. For, as someone has said, it is 
exactly where biology leaves off that all religion 
begins. Yet why not have all—botany, biology, and 


56 A Moneyless Magnate 

religion? That is the question the Morning Tourist 
was asked by the blossoming inorganic world. 

But if so many awe-provoking sights are visible 
in the inorganic, what is one going to do when he 
invades the organic realms? Intellectually stam¬ 
peded and emotionally overwhelmed, certainly, if he 
does not watch his step! If roots and petals are 
baffling, are not wings and warblings gloriously 
bewildering? If colors on trees and bushes are 
exquisite, colors on wings—singing flowers in feath¬ 
ers, floating through the air and winging from tree 
to tree—are lovelier by far than the most fragrant- 
sounding words can picture them. For, while fields 
and gardens are unfolding their panoramas of color, 
have not birds also been dipped in glowing vats of 
beauty and marked with every imaginable tint and 
tone ? In a single tree I have seen a goldfinch and a 
bluebird holding forth at the same time. It was a 
momentary study in unconscious beauty; for no 
man or woman could possibly have flaunted so much 
finery on Fifth Avenue without the happy, accusing 
consciousness that everybody in the universe was 
looking straight at them! Yet was not that a holy 
trinity of color that I saw? The green of the tree, 
the blue of the bluebird, and the gold of the gold¬ 
finch! 

One of the most royally marked creatures that 
travel on wings is the flicker. He is drawing worms 


Morning Tourist, Ltd! 57 

out of the earth by the yard, some distance away, as 
I sit here writing. His large body only helps to 
display his rich colorings. Still, neither that flaming 
red spot above the head, nor that black scarf across 
the breast, nor that whiff of white on the tail, nor 
the shining, russet-colored suit worn by the large 
body—these do not disclose the unforgettable beauty 
of the flicker. It is when he springs from the ground 
and unfolds his ample wings in rhythmic motion, 
that his unrivaled beauty breaks upon the eye. His 
underwings are of gleaming gold, and the gold is 
visible only in flight. Often, as I have watched him 
careering through the air and revealing his golden 
parts, I have two monotonously familiar thoughts. 
Foremost, that he deserves a more euphonious name; 
some mortal has inflicted a verbal wound upon this 
glorious bird by naming him the flicker. Why not 
call him a licker or a kicker, a whacker or a cracker, 
and be done with it! A rose may smell as sweet by 
another name; nevertheless, I would not take advan¬ 
tage of the rose’s unprotesting, innocent sweetness 
by fastening a harsh, unmelodious name upon it. 
Why, if the flicker were dependent upon its name as 
a guarantee of its position in the scale of creation, 
it would most assuredly flicker out! The other 
thought this golden-underwinged bird flashes into me 
is this: How like a human he is at his best! As 
the bird discloses his gold only in flight, so man dis- 


58 A Moneyless Magnate 

closes his true qualities as he makes for the Infinite. 
Knee-deep in its muck and mire, human nature has 
no beauty that either God or man should desire it; 
but when human nature, with unfolded wings of 
aspiration and endeavor, makes for the highlands of 
destiny, it flashes forth from its hidden depths splen¬ 
dors of divinity and arguments of immortal worth. 

Yet more than rainbowed colors make overtures 
from sod and wings. There is correspondence of 
the most irresistible and intelligent kind. I had to 
take off my hat one Sunday morning to Valiant 
Mr. Woodpecker. I was out in the open getting 
tuned up for my sermon in Central Church, but lo! 
this gentleman in feathers was already in tune and 
preaching furiously from his tree pulpit. There he 
was, walking up and down, over and around the body 
of the tree. I soon found that the tree served him 
for his breakfast table, and he was swallowing in¬ 
sects as gormandizingly as John Barleycorn swallows 
“hooch.” Ever and anon he paused at his feast and 
sang; as he sang, he listened; and while he listened, 
he got his answer. For, a considerable distance away, 
Mrs. Woodpecker was also serving herself at an 
oak-tree cafeteria. Each time my nearby friend sent 
his vocal wireless, she answered promptly in the clear, 
spontaneous woodpecker code. Did they under¬ 
stand? Now, don’t be foolish, friend! The consti¬ 
tution of the universe would violate itself if it failed 


Morning Tourist, Ltd! 59 

to keep faith with a pair of woodpeckers on a May 
morning. 

So, there is hope for you, provided you do not 
insist on being the living prototype of the gentleman 
whose brief but significant biography was written 
millenniums ago: “The fool hath said in his heart, 
There is no God.” And does not the fool always 
go wrong, first, in his heart? Becoming a moral 
cripple, he begins to pull down the blinds in the 
house of life. Then, in that morally smothering, 
spiritually vermin-infested atmosphere he exists 
rather than lives. And therein, with no window 
open toward the Infinite, he inwardly rots. The 
foul contagion of his foolishness, creeping from his 
heart to his head, produces gradual death. At last 
he blatantly screams that there is no God. In a 
living universe he alone seems to have been neglected 
by the undertaker, being thoroughly dead, but un¬ 
buried. And the combined paradox, satire, sarcasm, 
irony, and idiocy of it all is: If a man says, There 
is no gravitation, we reply, Shut up, you fool, or 
you’ll get yourself shut up in an asylum for the 
insane! But let some materialist or atheist proclaim 
from the cellars of life, There is no God, and there 
are many good-natured, easy-going, foolish folk who 
say, He is a smart man; he says there is no God; 
therefore, God is not! 

As for myself, I prefer to accept the conclusions 


6 o A Moneyless Magnate 

of Mr. Woodpecker and his faith-keeping mate. 
Without being able to read Tyndall on the science 
of sound, they instinctively assume that sound was 
made to answer sound. Thus, in our human world, 
wise men assume God; they act as if He were; they 
invariably find that He is. But fools never do. In¬ 
tellectual smartness is too clumsy to survive in a 
universe which, as Job suggests, hangs on nothing. 
Just outside my study window I sometimes see a 
big, prosperous-looking spider hanging on nothing 
also—nothing save a thin, filmy stuff without which 
modern astronomy would be seriously handicapped in 
its study of the interstellar worlds. Strange as it 
may seem, does not the fool become a wise man 
when he learns that the soul, as well as the universe, 
ultimately hangs upon the mighty but invisible 
threads of faith, hope, and love? ‘‘The path of 
science and letters is not the way into nature,” says 
the seer. “The idiot, the Indian, the child, and the 
unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light 
by which nature is to be read, than the dissection of 
the antiquary.” Consequently, when I go out in 
the splendor of the dawn, I invariably leave my 
electric flashlamp at home. Then it is easier, some¬ 
how, to find God, the True Master of the Inn, Who 
takes “a man who doesn’t want to live and makes 
him fall in love with life.” 


Morning Tourist, Ltd! 61 


ii 

The Morning Tourist, limited as he was, could not 
confine himself to nature only, however interesting 
and appealing. There were examples of human 
nature abroad clamorously refusing to be ignored. 
As our own is the age in which the factor of human 
life upon the earth is much in evidence, it is perhaps 
appropriate to consider this phase now. 

But not from the viewpoint of the specialist! That 
smacks too much of the authoritative—and the 
Morning Tourist is not an authority. Long ago the 
biologist, the sociologist, and the psychologist in him 
were summarily killed by the humanitarian and the 

f 

latitudinarian, aided and abetted by the vegetarian. 
It was all caused by the aforesaid conspirators rising 
up to destroy the joy and fun of the human in him. 
Little by little they were getting the better of the 
fight; but one day an unexpected ally suddenly leaped 
up out of his subconscious pool and smote those ugly 
enemies hip and thigh—if not with the jawbone of 
an ass, then probably with an infinitesimal but highly 
effective sword wrought from the by-products of a 
gram of radium! Ever since, those conspirators 
have been serenely quiescent, if not entirely null and 
void. If they are still in existence, they have cer¬ 
tainly changed their forms, obeying the natural 
behest of things that change but never die. 


62 A Moneyless Magnate 

Moreover, it may be that he has been encouraged 
in this matter by some words of Richard Grant 
White. “Newton saw no better,” avers the Shake¬ 
spearean scholar, “rejoiced no more in the beauty of 
color, than other people because he analyzed the sun¬ 
beam.” Add to these words that saying of O. Henry 
about prosperity, and you, too, gentle reader, will 
be disposed to seriously weigh my altered viewpoint: 
“When a man’s income becomes so large that the 
butcher actually sends him the kind of steak he 
orders, he begins to think about his soul’s salvation.” 
Now, if two such diversified minds as Doctor White 
and O. Henry, functioning in such widely differing 
realms as spectroscopy and beefsteak, arrive at prac¬ 
tically the same conclusion as my own, do you won¬ 
der that I am inclined to be a bit puffed up, even 
vainglorious, because I have foresworn the devious 
ways of the specialist and adhere strictly to the paths 
of the untutored human? 

At any rate, I hasten to exhibit a few of my 
human specimens, assembled from my out-of-doors 
laboratory. I had almost said library, remembering 
that old but ever new story of Wordsworth and his 
morning caller. “Is Mr. Wordsworth in his 
library?” asked the visitor. Pointing to the hills of 
Rydal Mount, over which the poet was walking, the 
servant said: “Mr. Wordsworth’s library is all out- 
of-doors.” As the Morning Tourist can scarcely 


Morning Tourist, Ltd! 63 

lay claim to either laboratory or library, suppose we 
agree on naming his quiet nook just a Lovable Loaf¬ 
ing Land. 

I venture to name my first exhibit specimen A. 
He is a boy on the verge of fifteen. In one hand he 
carries a fishing-pole; in the other a can containing 
worms. Assuming myself to be a member of what 
the mystic called the Lord’s Happy Boys, I forthwith 
undertook to be facetious. “Well, boy,” quoth I, 
“the fish are already so frightened by your coming 
that they have sought refuge on land.” “You don’t 
say!” snarled back this digger of slimy worms. 
“Gee! That’s fine! The land is always a good 
place to catch suckers!” 

From the emphasis he threw into that last word, 
I divined that he meant me. So we parted at once, 
worsted as I unquestionably was in the verbal skir¬ 
mish. Later on, however, I encountered him again. 
Now he was standing by the side of the lagoon, bare¬ 
footed, his pants rolled up above his knees, and in 
the act of wading out into the cold water. “Don’t 
do that, boy! Please don’t!” I shouted. “You will 
be dead of pneumonia within two weeks.” 

This time I won. For the boy, discreetly recon¬ 
sidering his venture, withdrew from the water’s 
edge. And yet my victory was short-lived. A voice 
out of the Land of Nowhere—much sharper and 


64 A Moneyless Magnate 

more accusing than the lad’s sharp thrust about 
suckers on land—asked: 

“Why did you yourself strip stark naked and go 
swimming in the Big Sandy River in the month of 
February?” 

I did not answer. The question was most embar¬ 
rassing. The boy's obedience to my earnest plea 
was in itself somewhat accusing. Like the man in 
the Master’s parable of the wedding feast, I, too, 
was speechless. 

Very different is my second specimen. He is a 
thoroughgoing man, successful to the ends of his 
finger-tips. We often meet in our morning strolls 
and talk things over. “I should rate you a very 
happy man, Mr. Ferguson,” said I, in the course of a 
discussion hinging upon the subject of success. 
“You came to this city from the country a poor boy. 
By dint of hard work and ability, you now stand in 
the forefront of your line of business. It must be 
very satisfying to have succeeded as you have.” 

Not in the least given to excitement or unmeas¬ 
ured words, he replied: “It depends altogether on 
what you mean by success. That is an elastic term, 
which contracts as well as stretches. True, I have 
played the game. It was furious, and not entirely 
devoid of fun, I confess. But now that I have more 
leisure, I think less of the fun and more of the 
fruit.” 


Morning Tourist, Ltd! 65 

There was an undercurrent of deep meaning flow- 
ing through his quiet speech. Just then a brown 
thrush—much to my surprise—flew threateningly 
down and drove away a robin, which was dining at 
the Early Worm Restaurant. The worm was doubt¬ 
less a necessity for the music-making of the thrush. 
Yet there was something so impolite and ill-mannered 
in the way the thrush helped himself to the meal of 
his winged brother, that Ferguson’s eye did not miss 
its suggestiveness. 

“Yes,” he continued, “there is a certain satisfac¬ 
tion in what we men call success. To come into a 
town like this, ignorant, poor, unknown, and by 
pluck to wrest a living and then a fortune from the 
arena of things—that requires industry, courage, 
and manhood. But there comes a time, as modern 
industry is organized, when rolling up a fortune is 
somewhat after the method practiced by that thrush 
on the robin. The robin found his worm, pulled 
him out of the soil, was in the act of enjoying him, 
when that bandit thrush appeared, helped himself to 
another’s earnings, and flew away. Naturally, the 
robin, if he could reason, would ask the why and 
wherefore of such a system.” 

Meantime, I was wondering what the worm might 
have to say! 

“Now what I am driving at,” he continued, “is 
this: Industry is a cooperative affair. We are learn- 


66 A Moneyless Magnate 

ing that society is dependent on all its parts, not just 
a few; that heads, hearts, and hands are not neces¬ 
sarily exclusive, but economically and humanly 
inclusive. The same is true of nations. The evolu¬ 
tion of society makes it utterly impossible for modern 
nations to get along without each other; therefore, 
they must get along with each other, or perish 
through their selfishly competitive and destructive 
antagonisms.” 

Pretty tall talk that! And all from a self-educated 
man, successful to the core of him, but not altogether 
pleased with his success. 

“You’re a preacher,” he went on. “Would to 
God that I myself were an ordained minister of the 
Gospel! Night and day, in village and city, on farm 
and in factory, in school and governmental houses, 
I would proclaim the way of Jesus—not simply as 
the only way out of our educational, industrial, and 

political tangles, but”- here he paused for an 

instant, as if weighing every word he spoke—“but 
the way of Jesus is the only way in to success that 
does not leave regretful memories.” 

What a revelation was this man! Had I come 
in contact with a new angle of the modern mind ? Is 
there an unchurched, creedless section of our human¬ 
ity, prosperous but disappointed with its prosperity, 
seriously aware that the law of Christ, which is the 
Spirit of Love, is not merely the only way out of our 



Morning Tourist, Ltd! 67 

international desert, but the only way in to the 
paradise of human satisfaction and achievement? 
Anyway, this modern mind has compelled me to read, 
with new eyes, some words from a little book which 
I have carried in my pocket for many years. “The 
atmosphere of moral sentiment”—so the words run 
—“is a region of grandeur which reduces all ma¬ 
terial magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch 
that has reason the doors of the universe.” And to 
these words of Emerson I cannot resist adding the 
words of David Swing: “The human soul must have 
freedom. By a gateway of wonder man came upon 
this earth; by the same gateway he passes out. The 
supernaturalism in Jesus is the best wisdom of our 
life in this world and in the world to come. He is 
the place where the earth blends with heaven—the 
line where sea and sky meet. He is the only miracle 
w r e need, but our need of Him is infinite.” 

There are still other specimens—so many, indeed, 
that there is not room to label them all in this imper¬ 
fectly constructed verbal cabinet. There is the little 
girl whose mother was feeding the blackbirds, which 
followed the peanut-bag around with all the cringing 
brazenness of professional beggars. While the lus¬ 
trous black tramps followed the bag, the child fol¬ 
lowed the birds, vainly striving to pick one up. Al¬ 
ways barely missing the elusive citizens on wings, the 
child grew angrier by the minute, finally stamping her 


68 A Moneyless Magnate 

foot with indignation. As the mother and the maid 
laughed, I joined in. Yet, could one, in justice, 
limit such childish outbursts of indignation to my 
unknown little friend? There is too much of this 
in grown-ups for one to be unduly severe on the 
child. I have seen the temper of politicians, scien¬ 
tists, philosophers, physicians, preachers, editors, 
and millionaires fired up by kindred trivialities. The 
astute blackbirds of desire failed to play into their 
hands, and mercy! what an explosion! If somebody 
had just roared with laughter at the proper moment, 
the peeved child of larger growth may have been 
shocked into a wholesome reaction to common sense, 
and laughed also. Is there not entirely too much bad 
temper in the world, and among people, too, of whom 
we have the right to require better manners? ‘‘Bad 
temper,” observes a thinker, “is the vice of the virtu¬ 
ous.” Bad temper is not confined to the virtuous, 
by any means; but the virtuous have no right to 
succumb to such a vice. “Anger,” said Plutarch, 
“turns the mind out of doors, and bolts the door.” 
There is, of course, a righteous anger—not mere 
personal resentment nor undisciplined human explo¬ 
siveness—that burns deep and strong. Its seat is in 
the bosom of God and in the soul of every genuine 
apostle of justice. Therefore, in all ultimate think¬ 
ing, the wrath of the Lamb is to be dreaded more 
than the roar of the lion. 


Morning Tourist, Ltd! 69 

To sum it all up in a sentence, the Morning Tour¬ 
ist saw just as many editions of human nature as 
there were human beings. Each of us brings his 
own map of the universe with him. There is resem¬ 
blance everywhere, but always difference, too. As 
Carlyle said, Newton and his dog Diamond looked 
out upon a different pair of universes. But it is not 
true of dogs and philosophers only; it is equally true 
of philosophers and hod-carriers. The whole seems 
to have been symbolized by that versatile musician 
in the top of a lilac bush. My favorite soloist of the 
trees is the mocking bird. A Caruso on wings, he 
is so glad to sing that he gives you, free of charge, 
a ticket calling for a front seat in his embowered 
opera house. As is well known, he is a master imi¬ 
tator, singing the songs of other birds as well as his 
own. I thought I had never heard him sing so 
deliriously and with such versatility. For repertoire, 
he was a combined Mozart, Wagner, and Beethoven 
in feathers. He seemed, as he proceeded with his 
many-sided program, a kind of feathery vocal expres¬ 
sion of the universe; for he displays marvelous 
variety in harmoniously concentrated unity. 

So, is not the world itself one vast mocking bird, 
wherein each soul may hear its own song, and as 
much of the music of every other soul as he is 
capable of hearing? Stars differ in glory, said Paul; 
and so do humans; they exhibit as many trillions of 


70 A Moneyless Magnate 

differences as there have been human individuals in 
the sweep of the ages. Yet the universe is one 
throughout its million-toned variations, because, 
within the dazzling splendor of His infinite various¬ 
ness, God is one; and the heart of His oneness is 
Love. 

But here we are entering a field which reminds 
the Morning Tourist that he is limited indeed! It 
may be well, therefore, to close with the song of 
“The Never-Old”: 

“They who can smile when others hate, 

Nor bind the heart with frosts of fate, 

Their feet will go with laughter bold 
The green roads of the Never-Old. 

They who can let the spirit shine 
And keep the heart a lighted shrine, 

Their feet will glide with fire-of-gold 
The green roads of the Never-Old. 

They who can put the self aside 
And in Love’s saddle leap and ride, 

Their eyes will see the gates unfold 
The green roads of the Never-Old.” 


IV 


An Artist in Living 

P ERHAPS you think the phrase should read, 
“An Artist of Life.” That sounds excellent; it 
also reads well, capturing the eye. Moreover, it 
smacks of the classic; and most of us are partial to 
classicalism, even when we have to take a second 
glance to definitely distinguish between Alpha and 
Omega. We are like the erstwhile laundress who 
married a rich man. Both were determined, despite 
the handicap of illiteracy, to shine in the realms of 
culture. They bought cartloads of books—classics, 
history, science, poetry, philosophy, best sellers, and 
everything. One day a guest was admiring a new 
edition of Homer, with its accusing, uncut pages. 
Still, the hostess, feeling that some comment was im¬ 
perative, glibly remarked: “Bill and me sure do love 
this Homer guy. He pulls off more fights than John 
L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain ever heard of.” 

An artist of life, however, suggests the painter 
only, while I have in mind something altogether 
superior to the artistic dealer in colors. He is a 
greatly successful human being; he is a radiantly 

white soul in a dark-skinned body; he has, for more 

71 


72 A Moneyless Magnate 

than a score of years, tended the wash-room and 
shoe-shining chair of a large New York store; he 
is now almost threescore years and ten, and “going 
west” with good hope and a morning face. 

“I am not going to make any suggestions ” As I 
entered, he was talking to a friend, who had been 
asking him certain questions. “My employer has 
always been good to me, and I can and will trust 
him now ” 

On inquiry, I found that he had just been placed 
upon the firm’s pension list. “How long have you 
been here, Uncle?” I asked. 

“Twenty-three years, sir. If I do say it myself, 
I’m a little bit proud this morning. They have j ust 
told me that I have the best record of anybody in the 
establishment, white or black. I tell you”—he re¬ 
peated it almost tearfully—“I’m awfully proud of 
myself.” 

After telling me where he attended church and the 
name of his pastor, he went on: “You know I don’t 
have to be here today. My pension began last week, 
and the rules do not require me to come down now 
at all. But I’m just coming down for a few days 
anyway— doing a few extra things that need to be 
done” 

But there were no italics in the tones of his voice. 

«■ 

It was all said in simplicity, piquancy, beauty. 


An Artist in Living 


73 


i 

Certain things stand out in the old man’s character. 
I think they are of quite permanent worth. They 
write him down in the catalogue of distinguished 
souls. They place him, it seems to me, high up in 
the class of artists in living. 

The first thing is his fine sense of appreciation. 
Asked if he had any demands to make of the busi¬ 
ness which he had faithfully helped, and which had 
helped him as well, he was perfectly content to leave 
the matter in the hands of his employer. “Cer¬ 
tainly,” the cynic may rejoin. “Why not ? Does not 
the old negro know that he will get a better deal 
thereby?” An unintended tribute to the employer, 
yet the remark is thoroughly unjust to the colored 
man. While it is not wise to “bank” absolutely 
upon human nature, I am sure that the old shine- 
man’s decision represents a habit of mind, an 
attitude toward life, the invaluable temperament of 
appreciation. 

Are not half the uglinesses of life born out of 
the womb of ingratitude, out of our obstinate blind¬ 
ness to the beauty and goodness calling upon us day 
after day ? How else, for example, are we to account 
for our stinginess toward Nature ? Generation after 
generation the old Mother stands with outstretched 
hands patiently begging her children—for what? 


74 A Moneyless Magnate 

Just a few pennies from our toy banks of apprecia¬ 
tion, that she may give us undreamed wealth in 
return. “Nature is the only book/’ said Goethe, 
“that has a great lesson on every page.” And is it 
not because both Goethe and Wordsworth saw and 
read Nature’s great lessons, that we hold them for¬ 
ever in our hearts? As for the latter, he suggests 
reality—Wordsworth’s chief contribution to the 
world, as indeed high-toned reality is any soul’s 
supreme offering to God and men. Stripping away 
the veneer and frescoes with which artificial rime- 
sters had overlaid the poetry of the time, Words¬ 
worth said: “Come, now. Be genuine. Look into 
Nature’s soul and she will smite you through with 
strokes of her own majesty and loveliness.” And 
it was so. A new school of singers, quite able 
to forsake the dusty nests of custom and fly abroad 
in the pure, bracing skies of truth, came to birth. 

Appreciation is therefore the foundation of the 
artist in living. He is no longer deceived by the 
camouflage that mars certain huge ships of culture 
sailing artificial seas. Admitting the greatness of 
art, he knows that all true art is fathered by life 
and mothered by character. False teachers say that 
I must first go to the library to discover greatness. 
But William Shakespeare and Oliver Cromwell, 
Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee were great 
long before their names were caught within the four 


An Artist in Living 75 

walls of any library. They say that I must first go 
to the art gallery to discern beauty. Where do stars 
and daisies and children’s faces come in? They 
say that I must first go to the orchestra to hear 
music ? What did God make larks and nightingales 
for? They say that I must first go to the forum 
to learn wisdom. A fine proposition truly; it looks 
well in text-books on rhetoric: but it assumes that 
God is dumb and that I am deaf. Nay; all of these 
are second, because life—the warm, budding, bloom¬ 
ing breath of life—is first, even as God is first and 
the universe second. 

Moreover, the arts owe their being to the simple 
and glorious truth that they embody some phase of 
life. Both arts and institutions keep the even tenor 
of their way only by keeping up with life; other¬ 
wise, they become mere shells cast upon the shores 
of oblivion, while the sea of life flows calmly on 
through the channels of infinity. Only life counts; 
existence is of little worth, or at least far down in 
the scale of being, as the worm lazily proves. Stu¬ 
dents know how reading of greatness may degenerate 
into self-indulgent pastime; but an honest endeavor 
to be great—great in simplicity, great in helpfulness, 
great in lovingkindness, great in truthfulness, great 
in trustfulness, great in mental hospitality, great in 
humility—this is indeed that industrious idealism 
which brings from the mines of the Infinite the dia- 


76 A Moneyless Magnate 

monds of character, the glowing rewards of high 
and faithful living. Such endeavor may be likened 
unto the grease plate attached to the wonderful 
machines at the Kimberley diamond mines. All sorts 
of things tumble over it—emeralds, opals, nails, solid 
substances; but when a diamond strikes the grease 
plate it sticks. There is a strange affinity between 
the grease and the diamond. Similarly, the appre¬ 
ciative nature picks up spiritual diamonds at every 
step in life’s journey. And these jewels are always 
gleaming through the dust of the commonplace, 
always shining in the fields of the extraordinary. 
The elder Hallam says that his son Arthur was espe¬ 
cially deficient in the power of memory. “But,” he 
adds, “he could remember anything, as a friend 
observed to the Editor, that was associated with an 
idea.” Did not my colored friend, all unconsciously 
but most impressively, thrust one of life’s major 
ideas fairly at me? Henceforth I shall count him a 
benefactor. I am resolved to strengthen my own 
memory on the side of appreciation. 

11 

There is another truth shining through the fea¬ 
tures of this lustrous man. It is the imprint of soul- 
satisfaction made by a splendid fidelity. “If I do 
say it myself, I’m a little proud this morning. They 
have just told me that I have the best record of any- 


An Artist in Living 77 

body in the house, white or black.” If this be pride, 
then it is the pride Heaven adores. For I know not 
what else can yield one such unalloyed satisfaction 
as an honest, bravely wrought record. It produces 
a feeling in the soul akin to the loveliness of the 
sunset’s afterglow. It is spiritually diffusive; it is 
the shine of character upon the daily deed; it affirms 
the loyal devotion of precious hours to the matter 
in hand; it utters the soul’s amen to the joy and 
necessity of work while it is yet day. Therefore, 
the night comes quietly, luminously on; it is so full 
of stars that the darkness can scarcely find room 
within their mellow interspaces. “We work till 
the evening,” Doctor George A. Gordon wrote me 
in the most beautiful of letters, “and then for pay 
we receive the freedom of the universe!” 

Yet I am sure that my colored friend, justly proud 
of his record, is not a disciple of those masters who 
teach salvation by character or by works. Indeed, I 
soon discovered the secret of his loyalty. Like 
Charles Kingsley, he, too, has a Friend. That 
Friend is the Saviour; that Saviour deals with his 
sin; consequently, that Saviour makes his salvation 
vital, deep, personal. And is there not unassailable 
ground for believing that all the rich character which 
worthily and permanently avails, in man’s long pil¬ 
grimage through an infinite universe, grows out of 
this always new, impregnable reality? 


78 A Moneyless Magnate > 

if 

“A man called Dante, I have heard, 

Once ranged the country-side; 

He knew to dawn’s mysterious word 
What drowsy birds replied. 

He knew the deep sea’s voice, its gleams 
And tremulous lights afar. 

When he lay down at night, in dreams 
He tramped from star to star.” 

We are all out on a Dantesque journey. Going 
away to spend the night, a handbag will do; but 
going away to spend Eternity, we require large 
equipment. Tramping from star to star is not a 
task that can be triumphantly performed by a spirit¬ 
ual tyro. 

As this is not just a diversion, a curious byplay in 
intellectual gymnastics suggested by a lowly human 
being as human beings are measured by the world’s 
inadequate yardstick, I wish to recall the words of a 
g^reat scholar and a lofty soul upon this point. 
Speaking to Christian people in Carnegie Hall, 
Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton Uni¬ 
versity, said: “I speak on controversial ground here, 
but before I got to this platform I spoke a few 
minutes with several gentlemen of those faiths which 
teach salvation by character. I regard such an enter¬ 
prise as one of despair. Just how you feel about 
your character I do not know, but I know how I 


An Artist in Living 79 

feel about my own. I would not care to offer it as 
a certificate of salvation.” 

Three things stand out in this thinker’s statement. 
So long as men teach salvation by character, denying 
the altogether unique and saving act of God on 
Calvary, the ground will remain controversial. There 
can be no salvation without character, that is not 
even debatable; but to make salvation by character 
the chief cornerstone of a theology or ethic, mis¬ 
construes the facts behind the towering men of 
history; it ignores the profoundest problems in con¬ 
science and consciousness ; it negatives the method of 
the Incarnation, if not its backlying purpose; it 
proves, if not a clear-cut shallowness, at least a 
lack of spiritual and mental inclusiveness in the 
make-up of those sincerely holding it. To gayly as¬ 
sert, as so-called liberals do, that the New Testament 
conception of salvation is wooden and mechanical, 
and forsooth needs to be corrected by the modern 
man’s unfolding religious consciousness—well, it is 
gay assertiveness, anyway. To be told that Paul, for 
example, was hopelessly entangled by temporary 
thought-forms that have been forever superseded, is 
not thoroughly convincing. And why? Because 
such reasoning, if it be worthy of the name, fails to 
reckon with Life—the Life so deep, so rich, so fiery, 
so eternal that no verbal vehicles could contain it. 
As to the phraseology, what man does not use the 


80 A Moneyless Magnate 

speech of his time ? Were he to fail in this, he would 
be of little use to his own or any age. But the 
verbal drapery, the thought-molds are secondary. It 
is the Fact we want; and the great Fact of history 
is “Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” Throw away 
the forms, if you choose, and create better, if you 
are able, O liberal souls; but the Fact refuses to be 
tossed away; it is as unworn as the atoms, as un¬ 
dimmed as the galaxies, as fresh and green as April 
buds. 

The second thing: Salvation by character is ulti¬ 
mately a hopeless quest. “I regard such an enter¬ 
prise as one of despair,” says Mr. Wilson. So has 
every greatly perceptive and profoundly desirous 
soul. There is, unquestionably, a type of life— 
gracious, sweet, amiable, refined—that journeys 
along the paths of being in outwardly excellent form. 
It stands for good citizenship; it symbolizes culture; 
it is richly humanitarian and winsomely philan¬ 
thropic. No man can say that it is not good; nor 
would any dare say that it does not make for a better 
world. What one is compelled to say, however, in 
canvassing all the facts, is this: The type, though 
good, fails of the best; and it evidently fails of the 
best because it carries a closed mind to those mighty 
spiritual forces which produced Paul in one age, 
Augustine in another, Luther in another, Wesley in 
another, Westcott in another, Fairbairn in another, 


An Artist in Living 8l 

and Denney in another and later still. The difference 
is not one of scholarship; there have been just as 
able and eminent scholars in the opposing schools; 
the difference is one of distinctly definite Christian 
consciousness as set over against distinctly indefinite 
Christian consciousness. In a word, it is the kind 
of life wanting in what Bagehot said Augustine had 
—“an experiencing nature.” At any rate, it is lack¬ 
ing in the power, perhaps due to the closing of cer¬ 
tain sides of the nature, to experience in the classic 
and eternal worths of a full-orbed and undiluted 
Christianity. 

The third statement is also worthy of considera¬ 
tion. “Just how you feel about your character, I 
do not know; but I know how I feel about my own. 
I would not care to offer it as a certificate of sal¬ 
vation.” Is not this the mood of every thoroughly 
rational life, face to face with sin, death, and des¬ 
tiny? We know how expert is the soul in conven¬ 
iently shutting its eyes; it has rare facility, also, for 
putting on false faces; and it knows how to clothe 
itself in Emersonian transcendentalisms. But the 
soul has an inner ear, even when it blinds its eyes; 
it can hear, when it cannot see, and it knows the 
crack of doom when it sounds; and doom cares not 
for spiritual rhetoric or generous make-believe. For 
then Man cries unto God in earnest. Matthew 
Arnold sings the undying truth: 


82 A Moneyless Magnate 

“When the soul, growing clearer, 

Sees God no nearer ; 

When the soul, mounting higher, 

To God comes no nigher; 

But the arch-fiend Pride 
Mounts at her side, 

Foiling her high emprise, 

Sealing her eager eyes, 

And, when she fain would soar, 

Makes idols to adore, 

Changing the pure emotion 
Of her high devotion, 

To a skin-deep sense 
Of her own eloquence; 

Strong to deceive, strong to enslave— 

Save, oh! save.” 

Very much more Christocentric is Browning. 
Speaking of his own religious convictions to Mrs. 
Orr, his biographer, he closed by reading to her the 
“Epilogue to Dramatis Personnae.” “It will be 
remembered,” she goes on, “that the beautiful and 
pathetic second part of the poem is a cry of spiritual 
bereavement, the cry of those victims of nineteenth 
century skepticism for whom incarnate Love has dis¬ 
appeared from the universe, carrying with it the 
belief in God. The third part attests the continued 
existence of God in Christ, as mystically present to 
the individual soul: 

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 

Become my universe that feels and knows. 


An Artist in Living 83 

‘That face,’ said Mr. Browning as he closed the 
book, ‘that face is the face of Christ: that is how 
I feel Him.’ ” 

It is so of Paul, of Browning, of the humble 
negro. The unknown, as the well known, has a 
good record because he has a good God. That 
explains my obscure friend’s sunset saintliness. The 
dew of the morning and the heat of the noontide 
survive in the tranquil splendor of the evening. An 
artist in living, and not just an artist of life, he jour¬ 
neys west with little baggage and much integrity. 
There is a thrushlike note in his voice, a note blown 
from far-off heights, and it rings, as Swinburne 
might say, “like a golden jewel down a golden stair.” 

hi 

Surely, not the least important side of the man is 
revealed in the fact that he had come to the store 
that very morning. His presence was not required, 
having already earned his vesper holiday. “But,” 
he said, “I’m coming down for a few days anyway— 
just doing a few extra things that need to he done” 

Ah! that word “extra” is alive with great 
thoughts; it is vibrant with spiritual music; it sug¬ 
gests a quality of genius that cannot be unduly cele¬ 
brated. Were the world robbed of the souls profi¬ 
cient in the fine art of doing more than is required, 
earth would be as vacant as summer chairs on March 


84 A Moneyless Magnate 

verandas bleakly waiting for June’s return. For the 
extra-doing life is of paramount worth. It is the 
index to all the noble mothers who have carried the 
children of men under their hearts. “The only bad 
thing Mother ever does is to die, go away and leave 
you!” exclaimed an understanding soul. But even 
then we hear the melody of their sacred feet falling 
upon heavenly floors. Mothers give us peeps into 
glory, as Henry Vaughan suggests, tuning our heart- 
lyres to the victorious chant: 

“Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just, 
Shining nowhere but in the dark; 

What mysteries lie beyond thy dust, 

Could man outlook that mark!” 

Nor is it otherwise with opulent fatherhood. Many 
a man’s inalienable soul-possession is the memory of 
a father who seemed never to weary of dispensing 
lovingkindnesses to his unworthy son. Now that 
he has disappeared, gone in behind all forms and 
horizons of matter, his memory irradiates the filial 
heart with a splendor surpassing twilight skies, after 
the sun has done its “dying so triumphally.” 

Then, too, when I think of certain shop-girls, 
wrestling with the unangelic giant of Modern Com¬ 
merce for the blessing of a livelihood, I wonder if 
there is not herein abundant material for some new 
Iliad of heroism. I think of one who is the sole 
support of aged parents; of another, the head of a 


An Artist in Living 85 

household, feeding and clothing her two orphan 
sisters, and struggling to keep them in school; of a 
third, a woman of sixty—her hair is as white as 
Easter lilies and her voice is supernally sweet—who 
made a home for her aged Mother so many years 
that the saint once said to me: “Well, it does look as 
if God had forgotten to come and take me Home.” 
Her voice of ninety odd summers and winters had 
a far-away sound, like the soft sigh of a spiritual 
wind blowing in from Invisible Seas. She was one 
of those rare souls of whom my friend Doctor Wil¬ 
liam Francis Campbell says: “The old-fashioned 
woman is the only woman who never grows old- 
fashioned.” Yet do each and all of these unsung 
heroines bear their burdens unmurmuringly. I will 
leave the sentence as it stands; yet I know that it 
does not tell the whole truth. The fact is, these 
characters are all grateful for the privilege of serving 
in Love’s White Army of the Unconquered and 
Unconquerable. 

What about our soldier boys as exemplars of this 
royal law ? Have they not spoken the extra word of 
goodness and done the extra deed of heroism? 
Focus your gaze on Flanders Fields, Chateau 
Thierry, and the Argonne Forest. Those terrible 
nights are sown so thick with stars of gallantry that 
the darkness shines like the day. Our newspapers 
were filled with columns of names of both officers 


86 A Moneyless Magnate 

and privates distinguished “for devotion beyond 
duty.” It is a thrilling chapter in America’s golden 
book of heroism. We read in terse official language 
how “at all times this officer rendered loyal and 
intelligent support to the division commander and in 
battle demonstrated high qualities of personal cour¬ 
age.” And another: “Though suffering from ill¬ 
ness, he volunteered and performed valiant service as 
a telephone operator under heavy shell fire.” And 
this: “Under fire from enemy artillery, machine 
guns, and snipers, Private Hopp crawled out in the 
open within fifty metres of a hostile position, remain¬ 
ing three several hours, and returning with valuable 
information concerning the enemy’s movements.” 
Private Lee and Corporal Caldwell were separated 
from their company in a smoke barrage. Finding 
themselves face to face with the enemy, Lee lifted 
his gun to his shoulder and tried to fire. But the 
gun was jammed and would not shoot. However, 
Lee’s brain was in first-class working order, for he 
held his shootless gun dead on the Huns, who threw 
up their hands, while Caldwell rounded them up and 
disarmed them. Call it a Yankee trick if you choose; 
but it helped to save civilization. Second Lieut., 
Horace B. Scanlon is placed upon the valor roll for 
“exceptional gallantry and inspiring example.” 
Organizing the most advanced units of his company, 
he shattered an enemy counter-attack under heavy 


An Artist in Living 87 

machine gun fire. Mortally wounded, he exhorted 
his men in the unforgettable words: “Go on fighting; 
never mind what happens to me.” And so it runs— 
a gloriously monotonous battle song of freedom 
chanted amid the blazing hells of No Man’s Land! 

These, then, are the degrees we bestow upon the 
artist in living: A fine sense of appreciation, a splen¬ 
did fidelity, and a genius for thinking and doing 
“extra” things. One February morning I chanced 
to witness their embodiment in a colored brother. 
For me he has abidingly taken his place in God’s 
ranks of the unknown great. Therefore, I offer no 
apology for elaborating certain truths which his 
resonant personality set afoot within the precincts 
of my own mind. I recall that Doctor Carpenter 
once sent Sir Charles Lyell a monograph on an 
obscure specimen of natural history. Fearing that 
the scientist might think he was exaggerating the 
importance of the insignificant, Carpenter also sent 
an apology along with the specimen. Much to his 
surprise, he received from the geologist this reply: 
“Any single point is really the universe.” If this 
be true of the natural, it cannot be less true of the 
spiritual, and especially the spiritual as focused in a 
human being. We may not agree with Emerson 
“that everybody knows as much as the savant”; but 
we must agree with him when he says: “The walls 
of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with 


88 A Moneyless Magnate 

thoughts,” And it is our privilege to go on to a 
Greater than Lyell or Emerson and hear Him ask 
and answer one of the most amazing and sublime 
questions ever heard by mortal ears: “Are not two 
sparrows sold for a penny ? and not one of them shall 
fall on the ground without your Father : but the very 
hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not there¬ 
fore : ye are of more value than many sparrows.” 




V 


Bryanism 

M R. BRYAN’S exposition (?) of the philos¬ 
ophy of evolution is interesting from several 
standpoints. First of all, it reveals the Commoner’s 
uncommon genius for getting hold of the fragments 
of a proposition and trying to prove that any one of 
the fragments is more important than the whole. It 
also illustrates how a greatly useful man may con¬ 
sistently and continuously exercise an essentially un¬ 
traveled mind. Some people take their bodies around 
the world, carefully leaving their minds at home, 
because, as one unsophisticated globe-trotter ex¬ 
plained, “I didn’t have much mind to bother me when 
I started.” Moreover, it discloses what an impor¬ 
tant factor temperament plays in the conclusions 
which we form, whether religiously, philosophically, 
economically, politically, or even scientifically speak¬ 
ing. For not even the mental discipline and rigor 
supplied by diligent training in the study of uncol¬ 
ored facts can altogether ignore the individual’s 
temperamental strain. 

Furthermore, does not Mr. Bryan’s crusade mani¬ 
fest how deeply the roots of medievalism are planted 

89 


90 A Moneyless Magnate 

in wide sections of the so-called modern world; and 
the kind of medievalism, too, that invariably puts the 
minor before the major premise. Recently it was 
my duty, in going from one city to another, to pass 
through Zion City. As is well known, the “boss” of 
that rather curious community, Mr. Voliva, teaches, 
and commands his teachers to teach, that the earth is 
flat. Somehow or other, as I drove through Zion 
City, my thoughts insisted on flying away to other 
cities. For example, Lincoln, Neb., Tampa, Fla., 
and—oh, well, so many others that are being cru¬ 
saded by a similar intellectual hypothesis that I could 

not count them. Yet Zion City, Voliva, and-! 

Well, at any rate, as the psychologists teach, the law 
of association is surprisingly strong! 

Therefore, Bryanism quite readily lends itself to a 
definition: It is a form of human myopia. I pro¬ 
pose to outline this human nearsightedness in its 
religious, educational, and political aspects. Such a 
study will, I believe, throw some light upon the men¬ 
tal backgrounds, the intellectual roots, of many of 
the propositions which are being debated throughout 
the country. 


I 

Bryanism is nowhere more pathetic and injurious 
than in its religious bearing. Going forth in true 
Don Quixote fashion, it fanatically spends its energy 



Bryanism 91 

on windmills instead of deadly fortresses crying 
aloud for destruction. For what is the cardinal point 
of the Christian religion? It is love, because God is 
love. “By this shall all men know that ye are my 
disciples,” says the Master, “if ye have love one to 
another.” “If any man hath not the Spirit of 
Christ,” says Paul, “he is none of His.” The Chris¬ 
tian, then, is a human being dominated by the love of 
God, the Spirit of Christ. Possessing everything 
else but lacking these, he is not a Christian. He may 
recite all the creeds; give all he has to philanthropy; 
be an ardent patriot, a Darwinian evolutionist or a 
Biblical literalist; he may be rich or poor, old or 
young, learned or ignorant, white, black, red, or yel¬ 
low. But if he has not love, the Spirit of Christ, he 
is none of His, he is not a Christian. 

Yet Bryanism, with its myopic emphases, excom¬ 
municates everybody who does not accept its inter¬ 
pretation of God, Man, the Bible, the Universe. It 
insists that the method of man's creation is more 
important than the fact that man is already created. 
Following this tangential lead, it flies off on its non¬ 
sensical lark of turning the Bible into a text-book on 
physical science. But the Bible—the good and great 
and unique and unwithering Bible—rebels. There is 
something almost motherlike in its tender plea: 
“O foolish man, do not abuse me. Do not force me 
to do a work for which God never intended me. I 


92 A Moneyless Magnate 

am to the race what a true woman is to her child—a 
wise and spiritual mother. I am the record of good 
and bad things in human life. I grew up out of life 
itself. I am as I am because holy and unholy souls 
are as they are. My service is infinitely greater than 
to tell men how they were made; science can do that; 
but the province of religion, of which I am the 
' uniquest custodian, is to teach men why they were 
made—to obey God and enjoy Him forever.” 

Still, Bryanism has no sense for this august dis¬ 
crimination. It cannot distinguish things that differ. 
It glibly says: “The Darwinians cannot make a 
monkey out of me.” The obvious reply to which is : 
The Darwinians do not have to make a monkey out 
of that kind of thinking: the monkey is there already, 
self-made, and unblushingly proud of its monkey- 
ism. And this is said with entire respect for the 
monkey. This much-abused animal has a real place 
in creation. I believe this because I believe that the 
Bible and the universe of life teach that God is the 
creator of all things, sin alone being excepted. Was 
not Peter an apostle of Bryanism—a victim of 
human myopia—when he had his vision “of four- 
footed beasts and creeping things of the earth and 
birds of the heaven”? Commanded to kill and eat, 
Peter answered: “Not so, Lord; for I have never 
eaten anything that is common and unclean.” It was 
then that Peter was given a lesson in physical, men- 


Bryanism 93 

tal, and spiritual hygiene that men have been Bryan- 
istically slow to learn; for we read: “And a voice 
came unto him again the second time, What God 
hath cleansed, make not thou unclean.” Notwith¬ 
standing the fact that God has cleansed the heavens 
and the earth, the vast human tragedy and blindness 
is that we industriously make common and unclean 
that which has been smitten through and through by 
the splendor of Deity. No! I will not have the 
monkey slandered. He at least has physical and 
mental agility, if not spiritual imagination. The 
fact is, I find much in common—and in a universe 
going slowly on to democracy I do not hesitate to 
confess it—with my brother anthropoid, even as 
Francis of Assisi acknowledged a certain friendli¬ 
ness toward his little brother, the ass. The ape and 
I breathe the same air, drink the same water, bathe 
in the light of the same sun, are impartially acted 
upon by the same law of gravity. We have certain 
physical kinships that all the Bryanism in the universe 
cannot bawl down. The same God made us both— 
the monkey and me. I think he did a good job on 
the monkey. 

While I do not ignore the rightful position of the 
monkey in the cosmos, I do not overlook the infinitely 
greater dignity of man in the scale of creation, even 
though some men do persist in thinking childishly 
of the physical beginnings of the race to which they 


94 d Moneyless Magnate 

belong. The distinction of man consists in the fact 
that God created him in His image. As God has no 
physical image—a truth which large sections of 
Bryanism ignore—this means, of course, that man’s 
likeness to God is in his ability to think, will, and 
feel. Now, whether there has been such a thing as 
mutation of species or not, my big hairy brother 
chimpanzee and I are sustained in physical being by 
blood of the same color. As a matter of fact, some 
of his senses are much keener than my own. He can 
climb better, see better, and hear better. But where 
the champanzee and I part company, by the wisdom 
of the same Creator, is in the realm of mind. The 
monkey’s body is married to little mind; man’s body 
is married to more mind; God’s mind is so great 
that it wears the universe as a garment, immanent in 
all things, transcendent over all things, limited by 
neither matter nor space. I infer that the same God 
guides me and the monkey; I believe that we shall 
arrive sometime; I think He has other uses for me 
than merely those embodied in my earthly career. If 
the same good God has other uses for the lower 
orders of creation in this wonderfully glorious and 
evolving universe, I shall offer no objections, be¬ 
cause “God is the Personal Spirit, perfectly good, 
Who in holy love creates, sustains, and orders all.” 

But the most serious defect of Bryanism is not in 
its misinterpretation of the philosophy of evolution. 


Bryanism 95 

That is serious enough, to be sure; but the truly bad 
thing about it is its spirit. Mr. Bryan himself is a 
case in point. Witness his “reply”—if we may dig¬ 
nify his rejoinder by such a phrase—to Professor 
Osborn and others. Mixing them all up together, 
having no eye for thinkers that differ as widely as 
the poles, he places the atheistic Haeckelian and the 
Christian theist all in the same boat, and shoves them 
out into Bryanistic seas of perdition. “I presume,” 
he says, “no rejoinder is expected (because, evi¬ 
dently, Bryan had overwhelmed them so completely 
within his roaring floods of knowledge) to the an¬ 
swers of Professors Osborn and Conklin, but I am 
sure you will pardon me if I trespass upon your time 
long enough to thank you for the compliment you 
pay me in having two professors write in their effort 
to reply to one layman. (But think of what a lay¬ 
man, Mr. Bryan! The editor doubtless measured 
the force opposed to the professors and knew it 
would be necessary to have double forces on hand to 
resist such an attack!) . . . The answers of the pro¬ 
fessors whom you selected have exhibited all the 
characteristics of their class. They misrepresent 
their opponents, look with contempt upon all those 
who do not exhaust the alphabet in setting forth their 
degrees, and evade the issue which they pretend to 
discuss. The evidence upon which they condemn the 
Bible would not be sufficient to convict an habitual 


96 A Moneyless Magnate 

criminal of petty larceny in any court in Christen¬ 
dom. . . . But as far as evidence can be drawn from 
what they do say, it is evident that they regard the 
discovery of the bones of a five-toed horse as a 
greater event than the birth of the Christ.” 

This sort of thing may smack of wit, satire, and 
sarcasm all combined. The fact remains, however, 
that there is a glaring error somewhere. Professor 
Osborn not only does not condemn the Bible; he 
makes a noble plea for it. He does it in the Chris¬ 
tian spirit, too; but not, fortunately, from the myopic 
viewpoint of Bryanism. The Bible in the hands of a 
dogmatist is as unseemly as a swan on the shore. No 
wonder distinguished souls have ever preferred a 
hell populated by open-minded thinkers to a heaven 
overcrowded by dry-as-dust dogmatists. 

11 

Yet there is another application of the principle 
of Bryanism. Does not a large section of the educa¬ 
tional world lay itself open to just censure for teach¬ 
ing a one-sided and inadequate conception of human 
life? It assumes an ultra-intellectual attitude 
towards everything. It lays claim not to an out¬ 
grown philosophy of the universe, such as Mr. Bryan 
zealously defends; rather does it lay claim to and 
stridently teach a scientific mechanism and material¬ 
istic philosophy ill-adapted to man’s many-sided 


Bryanism 97 

nature. What is this but human myopia on another 
side? 

Here, indeed, is the cause of much of this half- 
baked scientific protest against misnamed scientific 
teaching. Living in an age of specialists, teachers 
are readily turned into human machines, grinding 
out only a portion of the grist of truth. They look 
at one side of a proposition so constantly-that they 
acquire the habit of mental and moral nearsighted¬ 
ness. Such may be the price we have to pay for the 
expert. But is not the price exceedingly high ? Are 
we not making our Experts unconscious profiteers in 
one-sided intellectual wares? Moreover, are we not 
compelled to admit a certain truth in the wag’s defini¬ 
tion : An expert is a man a long distance from home. 

Now this mistaken emphasis began more than two 
generations ago. With the dawn of Darwinism, man 
was compelled to make a new reckoning of the phys¬ 
ical world and of human society. With this new 
clew to the processes of nature and mankind, the 
temptation to study not only the biological aspects 
of plants and animals but the purely physical side of 
man, was inevitable and irresistible. The world 
never before witnessed such an army of scientific 
plodders and diggers. But a man cannot give him¬ 
self entirely over to digging without getting a 
stooped body. Nor can a company of scientists de¬ 
vote themselves exclusively to a consideration of the 


98 A Moneyless Magnate 

physical side of human life without developing minds 
with a decisive spiritual stoop. Mr. Darwin him¬ 
self is an example of this law. His familiar and 
melancholy confession of the decay of his youthful 
love of music and poetry is most saddening. Indeed, 
few generations have witnessed a deeper spiritual 
tragedy than that enacted by Darwin, Tyndall, Hux¬ 
ley, and Spencer. By their monumental work on 
behalf of science and truth they have made mankind 
their debtor forevermore. Yet were they themselves 
so blinded by the dust flying from the stones cut out 
of their enormous scientific quarry, that they failed 
to give their own souls that genuine and definite 
opportunity for spiritual development to which they 
were entitled—not because they were great natural¬ 
ists, but because they were human beings. 

The tragedy was all the more poignant because it 
was unnecessary. Multitudes of Christians have 
thanked God for the philosophy of evolution. It 
has not only furnished them with an intellectual key 
opening many bewildering doors in the immense 
house named the universe; it has vastly enlarged their 
conceptions of God, their appreciation of the world, 
and their vision of human destiny. As Professor 
Osborn reminds us, Augustine was a true disciple of 
the philosophy of evolution. So was John Wesley, 
Lord Kelvin, Henry Ward Beecher, Henry Drum¬ 
mond, and a host of others. All of these conclusively 


Bryanism 99 

prove that one may be a high type of Christian and 
at the same time enthusiastically accept the doctrine 
of development. They also show that men like 
Bryan and Haldeman, while unquestionably entitled 
to their own convictions, merely add to the gayety 
of nations by.verbally dechristianizing those who do 
not share their own parochial prepossessions. 

Nevertheless, the myopic and pedantic attitude of 
certain professors towards religion, even morality 
itself, is to be deplored and discountenanced. Dog¬ 
matic ignorance is no more repellant than scholastic 
atheism. Religious fanaticism is quite as tolerable 
as religious scorn. The one has at least the sanctions 
of morality, while the other grazes over fields of 
immoral license. These untoward conditions in 
academic circles, we are reminded, have been alarm¬ 
ingly set forth through Professor Leuba’s widely 
discussed questionnaire. Let us frankly admit that 
here is a moral situation that should excite the grav¬ 
est concern. I am using the term moral advisedly 
and in its deepest implications. Because such indif¬ 
ference, narrowness, learning, and ability, all 
strangely sputtering in one huge academic melting 
pot, and directed against religion, mankind’s abiding 
and transcendent interest, is a menace to the founda¬ 
tions of society; it is nothing short of a moral and 
religious calamity. “Wherever the sentiment of right 
comes in,” says Emerson, “it takes precedence of 


ioo A Moneyless Magnate 

everything else. For other things I make poetry of 
them; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me.” 
And yet, with the aid of Doctor Leuba, we are intro¬ 
duced to a large company of intellectuals seemingly 
bent on knifing “the moral sentiment 1 ' to death! 
That is decidedly what the leaders of thought ought 
not to be engaged in. 

And what but a tawdry, tinseled, rhetorical Bry- 
anism—a provincial, nearsighted, upstartish outlook 
on life—could have thrown these misled and mislead¬ 
ing gentlemen into such a wayside ditch ? To assume 

i 

that man is an intellectual machine solely is at once 
the height and depth of superidiocy. “Abundance of 
accomplishments in an unsanctified heart,” we read 
in the letters of William James, “only make one a 
more accomplished devil.” It would seem almost 
incumbent on Doctor Leuba’s group, in view of the 
bigger, better, wiser, and more learned men who have 
hilariously believed in immortality, to offer more 
valid reasons for being caught in such malodorous 
moral backwash on the River of Time, stoically 
missing the “murmurs and scents of the infinite Sea.” 
Is it because they are only one-third men who have 
learned to manipulate a clever mental trap, and are 
not, in the true sense, educated at all ? This habit we 
moderns have grown of calling people educated who 
are the possessors of one or many scholastic degrees, 
is perilously overdone. Profound reverence for 


Bryanism IOI 

scholarship is one of the marks of true education; 
profound disgust for its counterfeit—a lop-sided, 
conceited, one-idead Bryanism—is the inviolable 
right and duty of common sense. Why, therefore, 
do these gentlemen give such inept and shallow an¬ 
swers to questions involving the deepest issues of 
human welfare and destiny? Surely, it is not be¬ 
cause they are more learned and vital thinkers than 
Roger and Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Wil¬ 
liam Ewart Gladstone, Lord Acton, and William 
James! Reason forces us to base this tragic delin¬ 
quency on other than sheer intellectual grounds. The 
fact is probably this: These so-called educated men 
are terribly miseducated men. They are clever intel¬ 
lectuals, only superficially schooled in moral and spir¬ 
itual values, blithely Bryanesquing through chemical 
laboratories and university halls. They do not be¬ 
long, notwithstanding their cap and gown, scalpel 
and retort, to what one of the greatest and most 
learned Americans has characterized as man’s abid¬ 
ing necessity. “It is this free capital of mind,” he 
says, “the world most stands in need of—this free 
capital that awaits investment in undertakings spirit¬ 
ual as well as material, which advance the race and 
help men to a better life.” No man belongs to the 
free capital of mind who fails to develop the whole 
of him. Without a just and harmonious unfolding 


102 A Moneyless Magnate 

of all his powers, he is only a mutilated edition of 
human nature. 

However, Mr. Bryan’s conclusion that these men 
are atheists or skeptics because they accept the hy¬ 
pothesis (which, by the way, as Doctor Fosdick has 
shown, is not just a guess, as the Commoner asserts) 
of evolution, is thoroughly unsound. They are what 
they are for the same reason that Mr. Bryan and all 
the rest of us are what we are: that is, they and we 
are one-sided, prejudiced, and only partially devel¬ 
oped. “We talk a great deal,” says a real thinker, 
“about being governed by mind, by intellect, by 
intelligence, in this boastful day of ours; but as a 
matter of fact, I don’t believe that one man out of a 
thousand is governed by his mind. Men, no matter 
what their training, are governed by their passions, 
and the most we can hope to accomplish is to keep 
the handsome passions in the majority.” 

hi 

A third field for the mischief of Bryanism is pol¬ 
itics. Herein does it execute some of its most absurd 
as well as its most serious capers. Not only Mr. 
Bryan (though perhaps he has had a broader experi¬ 
ence in this field than most people), but a large 
majority of men and women, approach our political 
obligations with a kind of sixteen-to-one mental cal¬ 
iber, seasoned with the acrimony and side-stepping 


Bryanism 103 

of an Article X debate. Or, in plain English, our 
much discussion has not really hinged upon a prin¬ 
ciple at all; we are almost entirely interested in ap¬ 
proving or disapproving a person. Our loud 
affirmation of principles consists very largely in the 
readjustment of our personal prejudices. National 
policy, after all, may be only a stalking-horse to run 
over a man. In doing this, we exhibit on a national 
scale the capacity which George Meredith attributes 
to one of his characters. “She had the art,” he 
says, “of charging permissible words with explosive 
meanings.” Only, it should be added, we strain our 
ears to catch the full roar of the explosion, let the 
meaning be what it will. Thus, while warmly dis¬ 
cussing aspects of political action during the past 
three years, now and then somewhat distantly ap¬ 
proaching a principle in our purblind wanderings, we 
have been constantly and invariably aware of a per¬ 
son. Lodge’s “Down-with-Wilson!” at Chicago 
struck the keynote of our political and national psy¬ 
chology at the psychological moment. Subtle and 
yet tremendous forces of jealousy and hatred, con¬ 
fined to no class and to no political party, but per¬ 
meating all classes and parties, had been in operation 
before the Chicago convention; but that was the 
hour when all the politically disgruntled and the in¬ 
sanely jealous began to have their day. And what 
a day! And, also, what a company of political bed- 


104 d Moneyless Magnate 

fellows America has entertained during this stygian 
night of partisan, myopic Bryanism! 

Never, surely, since the planet came out of the 
firemist, did such a motley gathering of human beings 
crawl into such a political bed and emit such snores 
of patriotism! Politics do indeed make strange bed¬ 
fellows, but never did the stars in their courses gaze 
upon such a strange lot as managed to pile into this 
infamous and historic political bed. Just one glance 
through the door, gentle reader, and you will speedily 
pass on a sadder if not a wiser man. Behold Lodge 
and Bryan cheek to cheek and snore to snore: be¬ 
hold the out-and-out Hun clasped in the loving em¬ 
brace of the dyed-in-the-wool-America-first Repub¬ 
lican; behold the ruby-cheeked son of Erin, in the 
normalcy of things a stickler for dollars and doings 
Democratic, snuggling up to that stalwart Roosevelt 
Republican, James Roscoe Day; behold those golden- 
ly greased machines, Thompsonism of Chicago and 
Murphyism of New York, grinding out their anti- 
Wilsonian music in the contented ear of the Honor¬ 
able James Beck—he of ‘'The Passing of the New 
Freedom” fame; yea, behold, and take a parting 
glance at “the whole damned crew”—to borrow a 
Miltonic phrase—German, Irish, Italian, French, Re¬ 
publican, Democrat, Progressive, Socialist, Bolshe¬ 
vik, Anarchist, seasoned with George Sylvester Vie- 
reck’s “Hymn of Hate!” And then say, whether the 


Bryanism 105 

bed of Procrustes, with its occupant duly “trimmed” 
in the matter of length, long or short, ever slept such 
a motley, fantastic, international group of amalga¬ 
mated American patriots! Yet, do linger just one 
moment longer, I beseech you, and hear these holy 
patriots talk in their sleep! “Down with Wilson!” 
—this is the phlegmatic night-call of Lodge and 
Harvey answered by the myopic duet sleep-call of 
Beck and Viereck—“Down with Wilson!” 

Once there was a man by the name of Athanasius. 
Whether rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, he 
had the good fortune to cause somebody to invent 
the phrase: “Athanasius Against the World!” It 
would seem to mark the one suggestive thing in the 
meanest, most stupid, most vitriolic, most unreason¬ 
able, most un-American period of American history. 
For it has been and still is: “Woodrow Wilson 
Against the World!” No loftier tribute, I think, 
could be paid to that victorious man. He looms up 
as the one sublime success in a world of dismal fail¬ 
ure. He is not coming back. Providential men do 
not come back. They wait upon the High Hills of 
Tomorrow for the backward to climb up to their 
heights; and when the stragglers have reached their 
clear and lofty summits, behold! the prophets they 
stoned are not there! Already they have pushed on 
ahead! On and forever on they follow the Gleam! 
Slowly—very slowly—the struggling multitudes shed 


106 A Moneyless Magnate 

their poisoned Nessus-robe of hate and misunder¬ 
standing. They, too, lured on by the Light that 
never was, on sea or land, begin to pursue the ideals 
for which it is sometimes harder to agonizingly and 
disappointedly live than it is to quickly and tragically 
die. But Bryanism, whether in religion, or educa¬ 
tion, or politics, is painfully slow to grasp this truth. 


VI 


A Letter to “Main Street 99 

E DITOR Big Sandy News :—Inasmuch as I was • 
among the disappointed ones, I have it in my 
heart to set down some afterthoughts concerning the 
memorable centennial and home-coming week re¬ 
cently celebrated by the dearest town in the world. 
But these afterthoughts are after only in the sense 
that they are being written after the golden week; 
they have been entertained and thought through be¬ 
fore. It is not too much to say that they fairly 
haunted me when memory was especially quickened 
by the events which were crowded into the week 
itself. I had hoped that it might be convenient for 
our efficient committee to set the date in September 
rather than August, as I had an engagement of a 
year’s standing for the latter month. At one time 
it seemed possible for me to come anyway, and I 
was just ready to wire the program committee, ask¬ 
ing for the privilege of a sermon appropriate to the 
occasion. But the tide of events turned against me. 
Nevertheless, I did come home in spirit, though my 
bodily presence was detained at a distance of a 
thousand miles. 

107 


io8 A Moneyless Magnate 


i 

My first afterthought centers about the Big Sandy 
News and its remarkably fine memorial number. 
Having been a printer’s devil myself, and knowing 
something of stoking the fires of energy necessary 
to getting out an average newspaper, I was pro¬ 
foundly impressed with the skill and toil, both mental 
and mechanical, which went into the making of an 
edition that will be long treasured by every loyal 
Louisaian. The work of going over the files of the 
News for many years past that we might have a 
kind of historic moving picture film in personal and 
general references, was immense. As the edition un¬ 
rolled its glowing pages before my admiring eyes and 
grateful heart, I felt like shouting, not merely, “Big 
Sandy Against the .World,” but: “The Big Sandy 
News Against the World!” 

Nor can I resist adding, in this connection, that I 
am heartily proud to have begun life, even before 
the “teen” age was upon me, in the printing office of 
the Big Sandy News. I count those among the 
happiest days of a happy life. Even the memory of 
the enthusiasm with which I pursued those influential 
and formative years as devil, printer, foreman and 
assistant manager is of the essence of pure delight. 
Should I live to be a centenarian, no day will stand 
out more clearly in mental perspective than that first 


A Letter to “Main Street” 109 

morning when the Editor set me to sorting “pi.” It 
was a radiant Monday morning. On the previous 
Saturday or Sunday—I am not sure which—Uncle 
Henry Sullivan told me that arrangements had been 
made for me to begin work the following Monday; 
that I was to receive one dollar per week for six 
months; that I was to come and live at Grand¬ 
mother Sullivan’s and pay my board by carrying up 
the coal and kindling from certain rather dark re¬ 
gions, as my boyish imagination pictured them, un¬ 
der that dear old brick house, now long level with 
the dust, but which will ever be synonymous with an 
exceedingly happy childhood. Such a grandmother, 
and such kind-hearted, indulgent uncles it would be 
hard to surpass! To have been enriched with a noble 
parentage—that is something to be everlastingly 
thankful for; and then to have had this supplemented 
by such additional parental hearts—why, it makes 
one feel, with Wordsworth, that vows had been taken 
for him, indeed. 

But getting a job with the News and a place to 
stay did not solve the whole of the problem con¬ 
fronting me. It was also necessary to obtain my 
father’s consent. Having reached the rather callow 
age of twelve years, it is quite possible that I did not 
go about this phase of the matter very diplomatically. 
At any rate, on going out home Sunday afternoon 
and telling my father of the new realms of inviting 


no A Moneyless Magnate 

adventure awaiting me in the form of a printer’s 
devil, I found him decidedly unfavorable. Yet, as 
everybody knows, he had a soul of velvet under an 
apparently harsh exterior. His children knew this 
both by instinct and experience and habitually took 
advantage of it. So, having gotten my meager be¬ 
longings together in a kind of improvised knapsack; 
and realizing, moreover, that my bare feet and the 
open gate might see me safely through the danger 
zone of switches that were frequently threatened 
and rarely applied, I made for the dusty road, the 
town hill, and the land of my dreams—which hap¬ 
pened to be the old red brick clerk’s office in the 
court house square. 

All these hopes and fears, mark you, were pressed 
into that fateful Sunday. So eager was I to enter 
my career of deviltry that I slept little that night. 
Consequently, Monday morning found me up before 
the dawn and Captain Freese’s most alert roosters. 
Taking up my position on the Main Street stile of 
the old fence surrounding the court house, I began 
a long period of “watchful waiting.” Now, to be 
perfectly frank, and in the interest of keeping this 
record straight,—and moreover, if hard pressed, I 
could subpoena Miss Willie Burgess that was as a 
material witness in the case—in those days the Edi¬ 
tor of the Big Sandy News was not up as early on 
Monday and Thursday mornings as on other morn- 


A Letter to “Main Street ” in 

ings of the week. Hence my waiting from about 
four a. m. until sometime between eight and nine 
a. m. At the time, of course, I was blissfully un¬ 
aware of the reason for this somewhat tardy ap¬ 
pearance of the Editor on Monday morning. But 
we learn much in the come and go of the years. 
Past midlife now, I have concluded that from the 
days of Helen of Troy down to this good hour, 
young men have been inclined to reach their places 
of business rather late on Monday mornings; and 
if all the young men in history have been as fortunate 
as those following the unwritten but very effective 
laws of Louisa’s social code—inasmuch as Wednes¬ 
day evening happens to precede Thursday morning 
—the latter may likewise be included in this observa¬ 
tion ! 

Two outstanding days of these seven or eight 
years have marked themselves in my memory quite 
definitely. One was the late Thursday afternoon 
when the Editor and Mart Conley (no “devil” ever 
had a better foreman than he!) concluded that I was 
physically sturdy enough to “ink” that queer little 
old Army press. Talk about the thrill that comes 
once in a lifetime! I can feel the effects of that en¬ 
chanting experience after more than thirty years. 
My self-importance took on such obvious dimensions 
that the Editor, foreman, Boyd Ferguson, Jeff Wil¬ 
son, Ben Strachan—as well as John Stewart, Milt 


1 12 A Moneyless Magnate 

Burns, Noll Garred, John Ratcliffe, and Arthur 
Hughes, who often came in to “josh’’ me—must 
have had serious doubts of the future capacity of 
my hatband! 

The other unforgettable day was that Thursday, 
some years later, when the News came out, bear¬ 
ing this significant line in the upper left-hand corner 
of the editorial page : 

Fred Shannon, Asst. Manager. 

Well, I don’t know how John D. felt when he 
became the richest man in the world; or how E. J. 
Buffington—another Big Sandian almost!—felt 
when he was chosen President of the Illinois Steel 
Company; or how Woodrow Wilson felt when, as 
the late Joseph Choate says, the great President pro¬ 
duced state papers than which there have been no 
greater since the foundation of our government. 
But this I do know—not one could have felt any 
bigger than I did on that historic day when man¬ 
kind were appraised of the fact that Fred Shannon 
was henceforth assistant manager of the Big Sandy 
News! If we are really no bigger than we feel, 
I was vastly bigger on that day three decades ago 
than I am this morning. 

Quite seriously, however, those were deeply fortu¬ 
nate days for me. In the first place, I was enamored 
of the printing business. William Morris, poet, 


A Letter to “Main Street 99 113 

decorator, and translator of the Icelandic sagas, once 
exclaimed: “Would God He had made me a printer 
from my mother’s womb!” Possessing not even a 
vestige of the Englishman’s artistic genius, yet my 
early love of typesetting and the printing art has 
given me a slight appreciation of the ardor glowing 
through his words, which were thrust into my mem¬ 
ory many years ago. In the second place, no lad 
was ever more fortunate in his employer. Naturally, 
by virtue of appreciation if not by any personal con¬ 
tribution on my own part, I have continuously en¬ 
joyed a large share of the success which has justly 
crowned our local newspaper’s handsome career! 

Here I have rambled along too much already, and 
only one “afterthought” has been exposed, while 
there are very many more in the background! “Space 
is as nothing to spirit” is excellent poetry; but 
“space,” as reckoned by editors, cannot be measured 
by such intangible rods. However, I am going to 
ask for room for one other afterthought, even though 
it may have to be run “solid.” (Ed. Spencer, at 
least, does not need an interpreter for this shop 
talk!) 


11 

The other thought relates to the spiritual phase 
of the centennial and homecoming week. I do not 
use the term in any narrow or exclusive sense, but 


114 A Moneyless Magnate 

rather in its inclusive and enriching content. As a 
matter of fact, the joy of the homecoming lifts the 
spiritual feature into high and beautiful relief. It 
reminds us that human beings are chiefly moved 
and ruled by noble sentiment, which is essentially 
spiritual. And once we have set our feet upon this 
path, how quietly and surely our best memories turn 
to the Christian Church, and those who were and 
are fellow-helpers in the Kingdom of God. Take 
the churches out of Louisa during these hundred 
years, and what a different homecoming it would 
have been! Indeed, one wonders if the town would 
have survived its hundred summers and winters at 
all? For even the people who never enter a church 
would be the first to move away from a churchless 
town. 

Yet all this is rather negative, when my heart is 
filled with positive gratitude to those who were 
“found faithful” in the days of my childhood and 
youth. One of the first and best teachers I ever had 
was Hannah Lackey. I have reminded that heroic 
soul more than once of my somewhat informal 
matriculation into her classes in the Masonic Hall. 
When the bell rang on that first morning of my 
school days, I rushed in with a company of other 
little savages and preempted the first convenient seat. 
After much tribulation, she mastered the noise, or¬ 
ganized her classes, and got down to business. 


A Letter to “Main Street” 115 

Things were going along famously, when lo! the 
organized stillness was broken by the most ear- 
splitting and shrillest of whistles! With a sort of 
Lord Kitchener judgment seat in her face, Hannah 
calmly asked: “Will the boy who made that noise 
please stand up?” Evidently thinking that school 
was a place in which to display one’s ability in pro¬ 
ducing the loudest noise, and proudly convinced that 
I deserved a reward, I promptly stood up. Sum¬ 
moned to the teacher’s desk, I was told to remain 
standing. Somehow, in the stress of her work, the 
teacher forgot to countermand her order in due sea¬ 
son and I just kept on standing. Now, standing on 
your feet, after a little, becomes quite irksome. Then 
follows a period of shifting the weight from one foot 
to the other. That, too, after a while, fails to give 
the desired relief. To make a long story short, when 
the kindly teacher’s attention was attracted by the 
suppressed whining of the very tired human midget 
behind her, she dried his tears and sent him back to 
his seat. So far as I recall, that was the first and 
last time that I ever turned the atmosphere of a 
schoolroom into a shrill, whistling screech! 

I think of other teachers, too—Davis Holt, now 
an honored minister of the Gospel, John Hibbard, 
R. C. McClure, W. D. O’Neal and Doctor G. W. 
Wroten, who, though I was too young to be in his 
classes, in later years exerted a most helpful influence 


Ii6 A Moneyless Magnate 

over me, as he did over a host of others. Two 
teachers leaving a distinct impression upon the public 
schools of Louisa were Professors Anderson and 
Welch. I was working in the printing office during 
their time, but participated in the Friday evening 
debating society which they organized and fostered. 
Jay Burton, Will O’Neal, John Akers, Professors 
Anderson and Welch and myself were the ring-lead¬ 
ers of these weekly talkfests. Once Uncle Will 
Moore—the very thought of him is like delicious 
fragrance rising from October gardens!—was pres¬ 
ent when I had a declamation on Joan of Arc. Uncle 
Will was nothing if not movingly appreciative, and 
no doubt placed a much higher estimate upon my 
youthful effort than it deserved. Nevertheless, his 
enthusiastic commendation gave me a taste of the joy 
of moving people by the power of speech. 

It is evident by this time that I intend keeping the 
schools and churches together. These two great in¬ 
stitutions properly belong together, in no formal 
and sectarian manner, to be sure, but by the far 
deeper and more vital ties of shaping and creative 
ideals they nourish. Any education that is not in¬ 
spired by Christian principles becomes a curse and 
ultimately pulls down the house of civilization in 
ruins. Therefore, one can scarcely overestimate the 
religious tragedy of a nation that fails to inculcate 


A Letter to “Main Street” 117 

the spirit and teachings of Christ in the training of 
its youth. 

Turning from the schools to the churches, I recall 
some of the ministers to whom I am greatly indebted. 
Among these were the Revs. Cook, Cox, Simpson, 
Hiner, Jolly, Williamson, French, Reid, Switzer, and, 
in a special sense, Rev. John Hampton and Rev. 
Ernest Robinson. And then when one turns from 
the clergy to the laity—those lovely, cultured, conse¬ 
crated souls who are spiritual jewels in Louisa’s 
crown of rejoicing—there is simply not space to 
mention all of them! Where would the ending be 
were one to begin expatiating on his indebtedness to 
those who blessed and inspired his boyhood and later 
years? I think of such families as the Wallaces, 
Northups, Stewarts, Borders, Waldecks, Laynes, 
Yateses, Burchetts, Snyders, Burgesses, Burnses, 
Castles, Freeses, Conleys, Sullivans, Thomases, 
O’Briens, Gunnells, Lackeys, Vinsons, Garreds, 
Billupses, McClures, and—well, is it not a fragrant 
human lane that has no turning ? Plainly, one is con¬ 
fronted by a process of elimination; therefore, I am 
going to speak of one or two concretely and in par¬ 
ticular. They will serve as specimens. Thus held 
up, Louisa may paraphrase the words of the Mother 
of the Gracchi: “These are some of my jewels!’’ 

The first is Uncle Roll Burns. Among my earliest 
memories is the unfading picture of him as Super- 


Ii8 A Moneyless Magnate 

intendent of our Sunday School. He was one of the 
best any school ever had, I know. Lovable, devout, 
familiar with the Bible, and gloriously faithful, he 
wrought himself into our affections. One of his 
outstanding qualifications for that high office was 
his deep-down love of little children, young men and 
maidens. I am still keenly aware of the fine ecstasy 
that fairly possessed him as he worked in the school. 
He had a sweet, mellow voice for singing, and he 
used it as one who sang with the spirit and the un¬ 
derstanding. Somehow, in thinking of Uncle Roll, 
there comes to mind an incident in the life of the 
great Lister. In one of the children’s hospitals in 
which he practiced, one little tot, says his biographer, 
was asked what he thought of the great surgeon. 
“Oh,” exclaimed the child, “every time he comes in 
he just seems to be looking for a little head to pat! 1 ' 
How many little heads Uncle Roll managed to pat! 
And in that gentle, kindly pat did he not leave some¬ 
thing akin to sweet apostolic memories for some of 
us who are still climbing, however falteringly, the 
upward way? The summer before he went away, I 
took him for a little drive about town and out into 
the country. On returning home, and just before 
getting out of the car, he said: “Fred, I want the 
Lord Jesus to be able to say, ‘Roll, there is something 
that you can still do for Me down in Louisa that no 
one else can do, and I’m depending on you to do it.’ ” 


A Letter to “Main Street” 119 

Little wonder that the dear man of God kept his 
spiritual greenness until he slipped away into “the 
Land of Beginning Again!” I shall never be able 
to fully discharge my indebtedness to Uncle Roll. 
As I have gone over the country telling “the old, old 
story,” his name and influence have wound through 
it like a lovely song that sometimes steals unbidden 
into the music that comes only in dreams. 

The other character is a woman—and still in the 
flesh, I am thankful to say! We are in the habit of 
reserving most of our good things to say about the 
dead. This habit has got itself coined into such 
phrases as, “Speak kindly of the dead.” One has 
no quarrel with the fitness thus suggested; the criti¬ 
cism comes by way of contrast in the fact that we 
refuse to the living those tokens of lovingkindness 
which we lavish all too freely upon silent forms and 
faces. Long ago I resolved to spend more time in 
making garlands for the living and less time in 
botanizing over graves grown rank with flowers 
of regret. I believe that the thing is Christian, and 
I know it to be goldenly rewardful. 

High up in any list of the great women it has 
been my privilege to know, the names of my Grand¬ 
mother, Mrs. C. C. Sullivan and Mrs. F. T. D. 
Wallace, must inevitably appear. What I owe to the 
first by inheritance and training, and to the second 
by inspiration and example, is far more than can be 


120 A Moneyless Magnate 

put into words. Of the many generous character¬ 
izations in your centennial number, Mr. Editor, there 
was none truer than this: “Louisa has no more 
highly prized citizen than Mrs. Wallace.” The fact 
is, I could take your words as a text and write a 
three-column sermon on Christian citizenship, with¬ 
out so much as moving my position one foot farther 
back from the resounding shore of Lake Michigan. 
I would guarantee to prove that if the average citi¬ 
zenry of Louisa and the world measured up to the 
standard attained by that elect lady, several thousand 
preachers in America would be forced to look for 
other jobs! When I recall some of the crowned 
queens of history, and then set alongside them this 
and other uncrowned queens of Louisa, I seem to get 
a new understanding of Christian queenliness. 
Spontaneously do the Master’s words spring up in 
the heart: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto 
thee even as thou wilt.” 

Just a word concerning our little colony of Louisa- 
ians here in Chicago. Mrs. Doctor Funk and her 
daughter, Pauline, are well known and helping the 
world along. As to my neighbor and boyhood 
friend, Luther Walter, were we not all proud to 
have him bring back home such a splendid edition 
of manhood? He is one of our big, upstanding 
lawyers and citizens. It is not for me to say how 
much Luther owes to his noble wife, but I fancy that 


A Letter to “Main Street” 121 

he would say: “Everything that’s good!” Do you 
wonder that I am happy to have such homefolk near 
by? 


in 

And now, truly, was not the homecoming greatly 
worth while ? What friendships were refreshed! 
What acquaintances renewed! What eloquent by¬ 
gones recalled! What memories transfigured and 
reverently deepened! What vanished faces kept 
coming tenderly near! What defeats forgotten, 
what victories glorified! These were among the 
thoughts that continued winging and singing in the 
soul of one who was far away and yet constantly 
near during Old Home Week. I measure my words 
when I say that such a feeling and atmosphere as 
were there generated and manifested is one of the 
supremely deep needs of the whole world. Suppose 
such a feeling of fellowship and friendliness should 
descend like an atmosphere upon our own and other 
nations. I tell you it would do more toward solving 
mankind’s tremendous problems than all the patched- 
up social quackeries, national cunning and political 
cleverness can ever hope to accomplish. Every move¬ 
ment worth while must be fed upon the vitalities of 
good-will. “Interest,” said Woodrow Wilson, in his 
great Manchester speech, “does not bind men to¬ 
gether; interest separates men. There is only one 


122 A Moneyless Magnate 

thing that can bind people and that is a common 
devotion to right.” And how can this common de¬ 
votion to right be exalted, lifted up to great heights 
of highmindedness and unselfish beauty, save in the 
sweet, clear, sunny atmosphere of the soul’s home¬ 
comings and fellowships? 

Therefore, more and more as the years run swiftly 
away, one Louisaian is highly resolved to tell men 
and women of every creed, color, nation, and politics, 
that the only solution of right-living and happiness in 
this or any other world is that given by our Lord 
and Master. It is close at hand, eager to be tried, 
and as sure to win as the tides run in and out at the 
moon’s mysterious call. When statesmen learn that 
the Kingdom of God is bigger and more important 
than nationality, and the sole secret of all true na¬ 
tionality; that fraternity is fairer and more efficient 
than blind partisanship; that right-doing is more to 
be desired than getting back to the state houses of 
London, Washington, Paris, or Berlin; that, in the 
long run, it is the highest wisdom to practice right¬ 
eousness and turn away from iniquity—why, the 
world itself shall then feel the thrill of such a fellow¬ 
ship as throbbed through Louisa’s homecoming 
week. But let us not forget that the vast majority 
of our leaders are precisely what we want them to 
be. Now and then there are sublime exceptions— 
a Washington, a Lincoln, and a Wilson point us to 


A Letter to “Main Street” 123 

the uplands whether we follow them or not. But in 
these white-hot modern years, when history is being 
made so fast that it cannot be written, mankind can¬ 
not subsist upon its unique exceptions. How im¬ 
perative, therefore, that the vision of the average 
man and woman should be cleanly Christian. For 
if our citizenship becomes Christian, it will drive 
from public life, with a whip of cords knit of 
righteous thongs, every time-serving politician who 
dares defy its commands and better instincts. What 
a mountain-high responsibility rests upon the citi¬ 
zens of America this very hour, when war-clouds 
again blacken the horizon of the world! If, after 
all, they should be woven out of the treacherous 
shreds of our international phariseeism, the Lord 
have mercy upon us! We may nonchalantly say that 
it is none of our business. Nevertheless, righteous¬ 
ness, judgment, and doom do not pause to parley 
with our smug and ignorant self-satisfactions. Once 
the conditions of the law of “the sudden leap” have 
been fulfilled, they descend as swift as lightning and 
as irrevocable as death; and in their wake there is 
the desolating evidence of ruined cities and mounded 
wheatfields. And all because Jerusalem knew not 
the day of her visitation! 

If these more sober reflections are a part of my 
expression of gratitude and devotion to the town of 
my childhood and youth, it is because I there learned 


124 A Moneyless Magnate 

that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap.” The years have taught me that this unbend- 
able law is not merely individual, but social, indus¬ 
trial, political, national, and international as well. 
That is why I pray the spirit of homecoming may 
come sweetly home to every heart in the wide, wide 
world. Therein is hope for despair; forgiveness for 
hatred; love for misunderstanding; peace for storm 
and fury. It is God’s way of bringing Heaven to 
earth and of lifting earth up to Heaven. There is no 
other. Then why should we not begin again, and 
right where we are? Tell me, all ye who have been 
a part of these hundred years, some of whom have 
increased in goods and attained what we call worldly 
success,—tell me if, in journeying about the world, 
you have come upon any words so big with hope 
and wonder and fruition as these: “Verily, I say unto 
you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye 
shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” 
Consider that here is the secret of all true genius : It 
is just the art of carrying the spirit of childhood, 
with its simplicity, its freshness, its trustfulness, its 
forgiveness, into the outlooks and purposes of ma¬ 
ture life. And this is what I am going to tell that 
great congregation assembled from many states and 
countries and walks and stations, in Central Church 
next Sunday morning. One does not have to go 
anywhere in quest of the Angel of Happiness; he is 


A Letter to “Main Street” 125 

standing upon our own doorsills pleading to be let 
in. Then is it not yours and mine, O friend, simply 
to open the door and let in our waiting Angel that 
we may experience the joy of our own deeper home¬ 
coming? And however imperfectly I tell the story 
to that great throng, I shall accusingly feel that I 
might have done better because I had in dear old 
Louisa such a happy childhood; because there my 
loved ones either live or sleep; because there life’s 
richest friendships began and continue; and because 
I think Pine Hill Cemetery as good a spot to hear 
the golden tones of the Angel of the Resurrection 
as any bit of God's Acre in the wide, wide world. 
Wherefore, as we begin the second century of 
Louisa’s career, let us think much of “The Child in 
Me,” so wondrously sung by May Riley Smith: 

“She follows me about my House of Life, 

(This happy little ghost of my dead Youth!) 

She has no part in Time’s relentless strife, 

She keeps her old simplicity and truth— 

And laughs at grim Mortality, 

This deathless Child that stays with me— 

(This happy little ghost of my dead Youth!) 

My House of Life is weather-stained with years— 

(O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay.) 

Its windows are bedimmed with rain of tears, 

The walls have lost their rose, its thatch is gray. 
One after one its guests depart, 

So dull a host is my old heart. 

(O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay!) 


126 A Moneyless Magnate 

J 

For jealous Age, whose face I would forget, 

Pulls the bright flowers you bring me from my hair 
And powders it with snow; and yet—and yet 
I love your dancing feet and jocund air. 

I have no taste for caps of lace 
To tie about my faded face— 

I love to wear your flowers in my hair. 

O Child in Me, leave not my House of Clay 
Until we pass together through the Door, 

When lights are out, and Life has gone away 
And we depart to come again no more. 

We comrades who have traveled far 
Will hail the Twilight and the Star, 

And smiling, pass together through the Door!” 


VII 


Henry Ward Beecher 

T HE outstanding dates in Beecher’s life are as 
follows: He was born in Litchfield, Ct., June 
24, 1813; he graduated from Amherst College in 
1834, and from Lane Theological Seminary, Cincin¬ 
nati, O., in 1837; he was ordained at the Presbyterian 
Church in Lawrenceburg, Ind., having supplied the 
church from May, 1837, to November 9, 1838; he 
was installed at Indianapolis July 31, 1839; he was 
dismissed from Indianapolis September 19, 1847; 
he was installed at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, 
October 10, 1847; he died in the same city March 
8, 1887. 

Thus, within these dates lived and wrought this 
dateless man; for Beecher is like an immense opal. 
One has to view him from many angles to get any¬ 
thing like an adequate measurement of his colossal, 
innate genius. As of the precious stone, so of his 
many-sided personality—with each new turning 
some hitherto unrevealed splendor breaks out. His 
genius contains so many facets that he stands quite 
apart from ordinary mortals. And it is this very 

profuseness of his nature that makes it so hard to 

127 


128 A Moneyless Magnate 

write satisfyingly, dispassionately, and at the same 
time proportionately, of him. Almost a generation 
ago, Doctor Thomas Armitage said: “Mr. Beecher 
will be better understood in coming generations than 
in this, for now, to a certain extent, the universality 
of his work hides his universal success.” 

i 

It is a singular fact that both Lyman Beecher, the 
father, and Henry Ward Beecher, the son, were 
bereft of their mothers in infancy. The elder 
Beecher’s mother—a woman “of a joyous, spark¬ 
ling, hopeful temperament”—died of consumption 
4 two days after his birth. Lyman was a seven- 
months’ child, and when the woman attending his 
mother saw what a puny creature he was, little effort 
was made to keep the future theologian alive; in¬ 
deed, he was actually bundled up and put aside. At 
last a woman, urged by the curiosity innate in her 
kind, peeped in to see if the infant were still breath¬ 
ing. Discovering signs of life, she compassionately 
remarked: “It’s a pity he hadn’t died with his 
mother.” Fortunately, the verdict of history is 
against her! Thinking of those far-off, mystic be¬ 
ginnings, Lyman Beecher said: “So you see it was 
but by a hair’s-breadth that I got a foothold in this 
world.” Yet these hair’s-breadth affairs are trans¬ 
actions of no small moment, considering that God 
hangeth the earth upon nothing. Not once nor twice 


Henry Ward Beecher 129 

in this fair world’s story, has the hair’s-breadth 
cause paled down to the vanishing point only to un¬ 
cover the clear-shining purposes of destiny. This 
seems to be emphatically true of the Beechers; for, 
if the Something behind the best-laid schemes of 
mice and men and fate, had not been silently but tre¬ 
mendously active in caring for that New England 
Moses, tucked in his ark of flannels and set adrift 
on the Nile of being, all history could not have ral¬ 
lied to the speculative question of Henry Ward 
Beecher: “Father, if you had not been, where would 
I be?” And echo answers: “Where?” 

Happily, however, there is no need of wasting 
time over such a conundrum. Breaking out of his 
infant flannels, Lyman Beecher went in due time 
to his Uncle Lot Benton’s farm in North Guilford. 
Intending to make a farmer of young Beecher, Mr. 
Benton introduced him to a plow drawn by oxen 
never designed to solve the problem of either per¬ 
petual or rapid motion. Plowing fifteen acres three 
times over in one summer tended to foment re¬ 
bellion in the coming reformer’s soul. He did not 
feign madness as did Ulysses while plowing his cele¬ 
brated semi-cloven-hoof team; but his uncle and 
father were so impressed by his dissatisfaction and 
restlessness, that they decided to send him to school 
in preparation for Yale College. More than once the 
great Lyman Beecher said: “Oxen sent me to col- 


130 A Moneyless Magnate 

lege.” What an excellent sacrifice they made upon 
the altars of theology, and what a gracious ministry 
they accomplished for their day and generation! 

Like his father, Henry Ward Beecher was also 
left motherless in early childhood, being but three 
years old when his mother died. And while he was 
nobly fathered, he was magnificently, gloriously 
mothered. Notwithstanding the strong traits of 
their sires, one ventures nothing in the assertion that 
both Phillips Brooks and Henry Ward Beecher 
owed their largest and most dynamic qualities to the 
mothers that labored them into life. In Beecher’s 
mother, Roxana Foote, there was a beautiful union 
of those intellectual and spiritual powers which fitted 
her to mother more genius than is usually allotted to 
a single woman; and when her gifts were married 
to those of Lyman Beecher, it is not strange that 
their children should have such extraordinary en¬ 
dowments as to cause Boston to make a new classi¬ 
fication of the human race, viz., “The good, the bad, 
and the Beechers.” More than a half a century ago a 
college literary society debated the question: “Which 
is father of the most brains, old Mr. Burleigh or old 
Dr. Beecher?” Old Doctor Beecher won the day, of 
course. 

Of his mother, Beecher said: “There are few 
women born into this world that are her equals. She 
was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a 


Henry Ward Beecher 131 

woman not demonstrative, with a profound philo¬ 
sophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, 
and with a serenity that was simply charming. From 
her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic 
temperament; from her also I received simplicity and 
childlike faith in God. Do you know why so often 
I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of 
woman ? It is because I had a mother, and if I were 
to live a thousand years, I could not express what 
seems to me to be the least I owe to her. Three 
years old was I when singing she left me and sung 
on to Heaven, where she sings evermore. I have 
only such a remembrance of her as you have of the 
clouds of ten years ago—faint, evanescent; and yet, 
caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have 
heard of her and by what my father’s thought and 
feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me 
that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the 
Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has 
been a presence to me ever since I can remember.” 
Studying while she spun flax, with her books tied 
to the distaff, Roxana Foote became well read in 
literature and history, was acquainted with the prog¬ 
ress of science, which was just then beginning to 
interest scholars, learned to write and speak the 
French language fluently, accompanied her voice on 
the guitar, used pencil and brush in painting portraits 
upon ivory, was an adept in the arts of the needle, 


132 A Moneyless Magnate 

and was so skillful in all manner of handicraft that 
in coming years “neither mantua-maker, tailoress, 
or milliner ever drew on the family treasury.” 

These, then, were the parental strains from which 
Henry Ward Beecher sprang—strains that wrought 
powerfully in producing this big, vital, capacious hu¬ 
man. For let it be said at once that one of the out¬ 
standing characteristics of Beecher, and one of the 
secrets of his many-sided genius, was his compre¬ 
hensive, thoroughgoing, palpitant human quality. 
There was in him a tug of the cosmic, a touch of the 
human, a tone of the divine. In a letter written 
when he was seventeen months old, his mother has 
left a cameo of which his seventy-five years were a 
continuous enlargement. “I write,” she says, “sit¬ 
ting upon my feet with my paper on the seat of a 
chair, while Henry is hanging round my neck and 
climbing on my back.” Hanging about the neck of 
the mother-wonders of life, climbing over the backs 
of the never-old, ever-young mysteries of human 
existence—that is what Beecher did for more than 
three quarters of a century. After their mother’s 
funeral, the Beecher children were told at one time 
that she had been put under the ground, at another 
that she had gone to Heaven. Putting the two things 
together, Henry decided to dig through the ground 
and go to find her. One morning he was found 
under a window of the parsonage, digging with all 


Henry Ward Beecher 133 

the might his three years could command. Asked 
what he was doing, he lifted his curly, golden head 
and replied: “Why, I am going to Heaven to find 
ma!” And all his life long he was putting severed 
things together—now great thought-facts which 
seemed, in the minds of average folk, to be entirely 
unrelated; now knitting up human and divine real¬ 
ities, showing their essential correlation; now bring¬ 
ing together nations and sections, sundered by half- 
views of whole principles; now uniting individuals, 
blinded by prejudice or misunderstanding. A 
binder-up of the needlessly separated—that is what 
this infant grave-digger, smiting the tombs of life’s 
buried mysteries with childlike simplicity and in¬ 
vasive faith, will give the strength of his manhood’s 
years to accomplishing. 

Now his vast, inborn human sympathies aid much 
toward making so large a place in the world for him. 
Even as a chubby, bare-footed, rosy-faced four-year- 
old, battling with the alphabet in Widow Kilbourne’s 
Litchfield school, he saw and did things behind 
Webster’s spelling-book which made his tell-tale face 
a strong witness for the prosecution. Going in the 
morning to school, Harriet, Henry, and Charles 
would string out along the village street like Brown’s 
cows coming home at milching time. Holding each 
other by the hand, morning by morning they let fall 
from their wondering lips, as a kind of manna feed- 


134 A Moneyless Magnate 

ing childhood’s imagination, this hair-raising ques¬ 
tion: “What if a great big dog should come out at 
us?” Invariably Henry Ward, with the big-bow- 
wowishness of a full-grown Sancho Panza, would 
make answer: “I would take an ax and chop his 
head off!” What a pity that George Washington’s 
hatchet was not firmly clutched in his bloodthirsty 
hand! 

About this time he wrote a letter which, if it fails 
to exhibit the politeness of Chesterfieldian epistles, 
has certain elements of originality in spelling which 
might have made its author a forerunner of the 
phonetic method. A facsimile is preserved by his 
biographers, showing the large, heavily shaded, 
firmly printed letters. An effort is here made to 
reproduce only the spelling and composition: 

“Der Sister 

We ar al wel 
Ma haz a baby 
The old sow haz six pigs.” 

Beecher’s was nothing if not an observant nature, 
and this letter is proof positive that the gift did not 
wait for development until late in life. 

From childhood he was soon going the ways of a 
healthy New England boyhood. Nobody was par¬ 
ticularly interested in his future, for the very good 
reason that there was nothing in his present that 
even hinted a distinguished future. He was awk- 


Henry Ward Beecher 135 

ward, dull, a bad writer, a terrible speller, deficient 
in verbal memory, with a thick speech, and a bashful 
reticence bordering upon stupidity. That he would 
ever make an orator was a possibility so remote that 
it did not tinge the realm of future probabilities to 
those about him. His aunt said: “When Henry is 
sent to me with a message, I always have to make 
him say it three times. The first time I have no 
manner of an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw; 
the second I catch a word now and then; by the third 
time I begin to understand.” 

But wait! Many things are going on under the 
sod these winter days no eye can see. The mystery 
of next April’s violets; the splendor of wheat-waving 
meadows; the green of June valleys and mountains; 
the gold of autumn cornfields—ten thousand mystic 
stirrings and upward strivings and fragrant bloom¬ 
ings are potential in the frozen clods of January. 
So, also, this stupid New England lad is full of un¬ 
imagined wonders, is packed with undreamed possi¬ 
bilities, is planted with seeds of vision, eloquence, 
moral power and spiritual insight which will one 
day break forth upon the world and make it exclaim: 
“Behold, what hath God wrought!” 

In truth, two boys were already imprisoned within 
the stout, stocky body of this youth. Over against 
the mischievous, frolicsome, prank-playing, fun-lov¬ 
ing, book-dull boy stands a youth of exquisite 


136 A Moneyless Magnate 

delicacy, velvet tenderness, and winsome shyness. 
Even now he is watching things grow out in the 
wonder-teeming world. He knows where the robin’s 
nest is; he knows how the crow flies; he knows how 
the squirrel barks; he knows where the rabbit’s hole 
is; he knows where the sweet flag is; he knows where 
the sassafras, the hickory, and the chestnut trees 
are; he knows how the wind sings through the trees, 
blowing the poplars white; he knows how the sky 
wooes the stream, and how the stream flirts back 
with its sky-lover in wind-blown kisses; he knows 
how the moon climbs to its silver tower above the 
Litchfield hills and valleys, spreading a mantle of 
old gold across their enchanted loveliness; he knows 
how, when the green has gone, the invisible assassin 
named Autumn steals through the domes of the trees 
and stains their leaves with the innocent blood of 
Summer. Ah! he knows a number of things not set 
down in his blue-back spelling book; and he is 
working out several problems for which there are no 
answers in his yellow-back arithmetic. 

A lover of Nature, he was not only passionately 
fond of, but a devoted student of human nature in 
its manifold expressions. Henry Ward Beecher was 
so natively, so grandly human in the noblest sense, 
that he was peculiarly qualified to interpret the divine 
to men. The seen and the unseen were wondrously 
intersphered in him. Uniting so perfectly in himself 


Henry Ward Beecher 137 

the two foci of spiritual reality—the human and the 
divine—he spoke with unique authority of the things 
revealed by Him who spake as never man spake. He 
fulfilled Goethe’s dictum that, if one would enter 
into the infinite, he must first of all go out to all 
points of the finite. From his childhood Beecher 
displayed an inclusive humanness that made him a 
veritable magnet, drawing all sorts and conditions 
of people within the zone of his personality. Did the 
pugnacious Boston Salem-Streeters need a captain 
to lead them against their doughty Prince-Street 
enemies? Lyman Beecher’s eighth child is their 
chosen champion. Did the Freshmen class of Am¬ 
herst College need a debater to defend them from 
the brow-beating Sophomores? Young Beecher, 
hearty, whole-souled, humorous, takes up the task. 
Did Cincinnati call for volunteer policemen in 1836, 
when the pro-slavery riots broke out? This Lane 
Seminary theologue turns policeman and patrols the 
streets night after night. Did the little church at 
Lawrenceburg need a sexton as well as a pastor, and 
did the pastor have a young wife and no parsonage? 
Very well. The pastor becomes sexton, and an 
abandoned loft over a stable becomes a home for 
the pastor-sexton and his young bride. Did the 
royal guild of beggars want help? One, three thou¬ 
sand dollars to lift the mortgage from his farm; a 
second—a distressed clergyman—wanted only a 


138 A Moneyless Magnate 

thousand, offering as security the assurance that the 
Lord would repay it; a third, a school girl, requested 
a composition; a fourth, a seminary student, wished 
Beecher to write him a lecture he might deliver and 
from the proceeds thereof obtain a ministerial educa¬ 
tion; a fifth journeyed from a distant state, making 
the modest request that he adopt and educate her, 
and having spent all her means coming to see him, 
he had to buy her a ticket back home. And so the 
story goes. It is laughable, ridiculous, almost in¬ 
conceivable. 

Yet is it not an undisguised tribute to the brother- 
ing, opulently human quality in this man? Every¬ 
body—even his inveterate enemies—felt a kind of 
special ownership in him. He heard the newsboy’s 
tale of sorrow; he listened to the merchant prince’s 
unrequited yearnings; he turned the prodigal’s back 
upon the far country and set him facing about home¬ 
ward ; he talked the look of despair from the Magda¬ 
lene’s shrunken cheek and lo! the lilies of virtue 
bloomed again; little children brought him flowers, 
wicked men brought him thorns, but to each and to 
all—the outcast, the forsaken, the forgotten, the 
scholar, the statesman, the teacher—he was so preg¬ 
nantly, so radiantly human that an other-world 
melody wound through his speech, while the gentle¬ 
ness of his great soul warmed through his clasp. 
One afternoon I counted thirty-seven sparrows hop- 


Henry Ward Beecher 139 

ping about on the sidewalk in front of Ward’s statue 
of Mr. Beecher in City Hall Square. Just then a 
dog came running by, the little creatures were fright¬ 
ened and hastily flew away. Looking up to see what 
had become of them, I found that all but three had 
taken refuge on the head, shoulders, arms, and feet 
of Henry Ward Beecher’s likeness in bronze. It is 
beautifully symbolical of the many frightened things 
—causes, institutions, and individuals—that sought 
and found refuge in the life of this most human- 
hearted man, who was at once passionately loved and 
desperately hated. 


11 

In 1863 Beecher wrote to Mrs. Stowe: “The will 
of the Republic is to be the law of the world.” He 
believed this with all his soul; indeed, it is the key¬ 
note of as profound a patriotism as ever indwelt a 
great nature. Whether one agrees with his par¬ 
ticular viewpoint or not, one is compelled to admire 
the depth and steadfastness of his conviction, burn¬ 
ing with the rage and fury of an internal fire, just as 
fair-minded men are compelled to acknowledge the 
patriotic grandeur that shouldered Robert E. Lee to 
those august summits, whither the poisoned darts of 
obloquy can never reach. 

Coming out of the Brooklyn City Hall one day 
with a friend, he pointed to Beecher’s statue facing 


140 A Moneyless Magnate 

us a few yards away, and said: “Look at him! He 
stands there as immovable as the foundations of the 
earth!” Now, in a fresh and somewhat compre¬ 
hensive survey of Mr. Beecher’s life, nothing has 
impressed me more profoundly than the absolute 
independence, the Gibraltar-like firmness which char¬ 
acterized his patriotic stand and activities preceding 
and following the Civil War. For in 1850 the man 
who dared lift his voice, even in the heart of the 
North itself, in favor of legislation against slavery, 
generally met with a reception as cold as if it had 
been conceived in an iceberg and tendered by residents 
of the polar regions. There were many reasons 
which fostered such an attitude on the part of North¬ 
erners. Well-grounded fears as to the possible out¬ 
come of an open rupture between the two sections; 
the depth and strength of ties uniting the descendants 
of the New World pioneers of Jamestown and Ply¬ 
mouth; the incapacity of the average man to appre¬ 
ciate a new epoch in history, even after it has 
dawned, and the world-old timidity born of a deep- 
seated conservatism; the disturbance of commercial 
values and the financial disasters involved in war— 
these, and other equally influential considerations, 
did not make a congenial atmosphere for one who 
opposed slavery as ardently as the most conscientious 
slaveholder upheld it. And yet, while the vast ma¬ 
jority of his Northern brethren hedged and dodged, 


Henry Ward Beecher 141 

Beecher dared speak out his inmost convictions. Not 
infrequently he spoke when his life was openly 
threatened. At Elizabeth City, New Jersey, the - 
Copperheads declared they would kill him rather 
than permit him to speak. Amid indescribable up¬ 
roar, Mr. Beecher entered the hall, advanced to the 
platform, and said: “Gentlemen, I have been in¬ 
formed that if I attempt to speak here tonight I am 
to be killed. Well, I am going to speak, and there¬ 
fore I must die. But before you kill me, there is one 
request I have to make. All of you who are going to 
stain your hands in my blood just come up here and 
shake hands with me before you commit the crime, 
for when I die I shall go to Heaven, and therefore 
I shall never see any of you again.” He spoke for 
two hours, talking the murder out of the hearts of 
desperate men. 

Convinced of its own rights and the justness of its 
cause, the South had taken a position from which it 
could not be easily dislodged; its course was fixedly 
determined, and nothing could swerve it from the 
purpose animating its very being. On the contrary, 
there was no such definite and uncompromising pro¬ 
gram at the North. Henry Clay’s Omnibus Bill, 
introduced in 1850, including the Fugitive Slave 
Laws, was as heartily approved in many sections 
of the North as in the South; and the same was true 
of Daniel Webster’s speech on the 7th of March, 


142 A Moneyless Magnate 

1850. But notwithstanding such mighties as Clay 
and Webster, Beecher wrote his famous paper on 
“Shall We Compromise ?” for the Independent of 
February 21, 1850. As John C. Calhoun lay upon 
his sick bed, the article was read to him by his clerk. 
Raising himself up, the great statesman said: “Read 
that article again.” When it was read again, he re¬ 
marked : “The man who says that is right. There is 
no alternative. It is liberty or slavery.” Even ten 
years later, and three days after Mr. Lincoln’s elec¬ 
tion, the New York Tribune, the acknowledged or¬ 
gan of the Republican party, said: “If the cotton 
states decide that they can do better out of the Union 
than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. . . . 
We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one sec¬ 
tion is pinned to the residue by bayonets.” 

This, then, was the situation Beecher faced in his 
own section of the Republic. Notwithstanding the 
efforts of agitators like John Brown and William 
Lloyd Garrison, there were vast areas of pro-slavery 
soil north of Mason and Dixon’s line. And of all 
the men who broke up this fallow ground, sowing 
it with the seed of sentiment for the Union cause, 
not one takes precedence of Henry Ward Beecher. 
His untiring physical energy; his comprehensive 
grasp of principles; his inexhaustible resources of 
mind and soul; his fearless stand for the right as 
he saw it; his marvelous eloquence, abounding with 


Henry Ward Beecher 143 

argument, invective, zeal, and persuasion, stamp him 
as one of the great patriots of history. 

But it still remains to be said that the star of 
Beecher’s patriotism climbed highest and shone 
brightest while he was sojourning in a foreign land. 
England’s open and enthusiastic espousal of the 
cause of the Confederacy is well known. What 
might have been the course of history had the old 
mother taken up arms in favor of the southernmost 
of her warring children ? With this question belongs 
another: What, in all human probability, kept Eng¬ 
land from turning her deep sympathy into practical 
help of the South? Henry Ward Beecher is the 
answer. Going to Europe for a much-needed rest in 
1863, the pastor of Plymouth Church rendered im¬ 
measurable service to the Union cause. He did not 
go, as is sometimes averred, at the behest of either 
President or Cabinet, or any other Government offi¬ 
cial. Worn with the unremitting toil of many years, 
his Church simply sent him away to rest. He went 
purely as a private citizen; and upon arriving in 
England in July, 1863, he refused invitations to 
speak in Manchester and Liverpool, going on to the 
Continent. Returning to England the following 
September, he consented to speak in Free Trade Hall, 
Manchester, on October 9th. Met at the station by 
two Northern sympathizers, they said to him: “Of 
course you know there is a great deal of excitement 


144 ^ Moneyless Magnate 

here.” Great placards, denouncing Beecher and the 
North, and printed in anarchic red, had been sown 
broadcast. Beecher said: “Well, are you going to 
back down?” “No,” they replied, “but we didn’t 
know how you would feel.” “Well,” he answered, 
“you will find out how I feel. I’m going to be heard. 
I won’t leave England until I have been heard.” 

And he was heard—heard in Manchester, heard 
in Glasgow, heard in Edinburgh, heard in Liverpool, 
heard in London, heard clear around the world, 
heard to all coming generations. Measured by the 
tremendous odds against him and the venomous 
hatred manifested, by the opposition gradually over¬ 
come and the victory ultimately won, what other 
speeches, or what other eloquence, can stand along¬ 
side Henry Ward Beecher’s patriotic addresses in 
England ? They are verily without a parallel. Doc¬ 
tor William M. Taylor—and Scotchmen are not 
given to exaggeration—gave it as his deliberate and 
well-reasoned conviction that such eloquence as 
Beecher’s has not been in the world since Demos¬ 
thenes. Turn again to the Oration on the Crown, and 
consider that the old Greek was never really tried 
out as was this nineteenth century American by those 
howling, hissing, jeering English mobs; consider, 
furthermore, that in his English speeches every stop 
in the organ of eloquence was pulled out at some 
time or other, ranging all the way from pathos, hu- 


Henry Ward Beecher 145 

- mor, argument, sarcasm and defiance up to the sub- 
limest expression of humanitarian principles, loftiest 
patriotism and religious zeal; and consider, finally, 
that measured by actual results, Jhistory holds no 
such victory won by the human tongue as was ac¬ 
corded to Mr. Beecher in England and Scotland. 
Joseph Parker says of the Manchester speech: 
“When Mr. Beecher appeared the scene baffled de¬ 
scription ; the cheering, stamping, clapping, shouting, 
and partial groaning, made the hall shake again. 
Mr. Beecher rose to speak, but the audience must 
needs cheer; once more he got to ‘Mr. Chairman/ 
and once more the cheers rang out in wild and all but 
unanimous harmony. Mr. Beecher quickly caught 
the groans and hisses of a clique at the far end of 
the hall, and intuitively seizing the temper of his 
^audience he laid aside his elaborate manuscript and 
went right at his work. For something like two 
hours he went on, making his triumphant but far 
from interrupted way through facts, statistics, 
policies, and arguments, without so much as refer¬ 
ring to a memorandum. As an effort of memory, 
as an effort of the voice, and as a miracle of wisdom 
and good-nature, I never heard the equal of that 
massive and overwhelming oration. From that mo¬ 
ment we knew the greatness of the cause, and we 
felt that its advocacy was in the strongest possible 
hands. There was life in every tone, so much so 


146 A Moneyless Magnate 

indeed that the whole effort seemed to be part of the 
very battle which it described. Truly, it was no ama¬ 
teur eloquence; it was no attempt at scene-painting; 
it was a fight, a heroic onslaught, and, from my 
point of view, a victorious assault at arms.” 

In short, it was like kissing the lips of a blazing 
cannon; but he spiked the belching, flaming thing 
with his trumpet-toned speech. He found the throne 
against him; he found even that man who, in the 
estimation of many, is greater than any throne— 
William Ewart Gladstone—against him. But he 
triumphed over both, not only taming the fury of 
the British Lion, but actually training it to play the 
part of friend rather than enemy to his cause. No 
wonder Gladstone said of Beecher, the patriot: “To 
his undying fame the world and his memory stand 
in no need of witnesses.” 


hi 

“All the bells that God has put in my belfry shall 
ring!” One need hardly be told that the words are 
Beecher’s own. But the amazing thing, in going 
about his belfry, is the number and tone-quality of 
the bells hanging therein. Charles Haddon Spur¬ 
geon was so impressed with this fact that he char¬ 
acterized Beecher as “the most myriad-minded man 
since Shakespeare.” For one, I used to regard the 
statement as a bit of Spurgeonian exaggeration; but 


Henry Ward Beecher 147 

a new appraisal of Beecher’s mind has made me less 
skeptical, if it has not prepared me to altogether 
accept the English preacher’s statement in its bald 
literalness. So varied were his gifts, and so deeply 
did they impress themselves upon men, that both 
critics and admirers have said that Beecher would 
have made a great author, a great politician, a great 
editor, a great lawyer, a great farmer, a great actor, 
a great anything—almost! He was an acknowledged 
expert in his judgment of horses, arboriculture, hor¬ 
ticulture, precious stones, oriental rugs, and various 
other things. That he would have been great in all, 
or many of the departments mentioned, is largely a 
matter of speculation, while sober students deny any 
such probability. But that he was a great—a su¬ 
premely great—Christian preacher, is all but uni¬ 
versally admitted. 

What, then, were the hidings of his power? In 
general, they are two: first, the personality of the 
man; and, second, preaching upon great themes in 
a great way. 

Now, when an effort is made to define, to weigh, 
to measure personality, there is much straining after 
wind without unveiling the reality itself. Evidences 
we know, manifestations we see, but what is the 
thing? Modern chemistry makes heavy draughts 
upon the credulity of ordinary men in teaching that 
an ounce of matter contains enough of radiant energy 


148 A Moneyless Magnate 

to lift ten thousand tons one mile. But the lifting 
power of a radiant personality is more wonderful 
still; its might, its spell, its riddle savors of that 
which lies behind all matter, whether done into sys¬ 
tems, galaxies, and stars, or atoms, electrons, and 
ions. John says that one of the seven angels com¬ 
missioned to show him the splendors of the Holy 
City had for a measure a golden reed; but the walls 
and gates, length and breadth of the holy city named 
a great human personality, with its fathomless river 
of life flowing through the midst of its streets of 
genius, refuses to yield its real dimensions to any 
reed, however golden. Astronomers say that that 
undiscovered planet beyond Neptune and Jupiter 
would have a year equal to a thousand of our earth- 
years, because it would require a thousand years to 
make its revolution round the sun. Thus with all its 
glow and near-at-hand brilliance, a vast human per¬ 
son remains a kind of undiscovered planet trembling 
on the confines of being. Who shall measure Plato, 
with the dim memories of eternity singing in his 
soul ? Who shall measure Da Vinci, challenging the 
world to contest his superiority in painting, drawing, 
or chiseling? Who shall measure Shakespeare, the 
thousand-souled, or Goethe, the thousand-eyed? 
Who shall measure Mozart, hearing sounds it is not 
lawful to utter, and yet playing symphonies that lift 
the gates of melody off their hinges and let the floods 


Henry JVard Beecher 149 

of music pour down all sides of the world? Truly, 
more than a golden reed is required for taking the 
dimensions of these mystic, metropolitan cities of 
Man-Soul. We can only say, as of John’s city, that 
the glory of God is in them, and their light is like 
unto a stone most precious, as it were a jasper stone, 
clear as crystal, and measureless as clear. One might 
as well attempt to photograph the quiver of last 
May’s young grasses; or to preserve the fragrance 
of roses dead Junes ago; or to analyze the song of a 
mocking bird fluting in the sunset from the topmost 
twig of a Tennessee apple tree, as to measure the 
cryptic, indefinable, esoteric quality in lofty human 
personality. 

But that Henry Ward Beecher possessed this 
nameless charm, this subtle something that emanates 
from distinguished souls, his worst enemies could 
not deny. Many went to scoff, and not infrequently 
to hiss and howl, who came away suggesting the 
ancient inquiry: “Is Saul also among the prophets?” 
To take a concrete illustration, an ex-Confederate 
soldier went with Rev. Frank Russell to hear Mr. 
Beecher in Plymouth Church on a May Sunday 
evening in 1865. “Yes,” said he, “I am going to 
hear Beecher, for I never saw him. It would do 
me good to take a rifle along and just send a bullet 
through him as he stands in the pulpit pretending to 
preach the Gospel. If some one had done it years 


150 A Moneyless Magnate 

ago, the country would have been a heap better off, 
but now that his influence is all gone, I don’t know 
but that he may as well live.” Seated at last in the 
church, the speaker railed at the crowd packing the 
building, and even the building itself; railed at the 
organ, the style of the pulpit, and its furniture; 
railed even at the flowers that adorned it. Though 
the wonderful singing failed to conquer, the prayer 
rather subdued the rebellious auditor. Mr. Beecher 
prayed for those who carried bitterness in their 
hearts; for those who had been disappointed, and 
hurt, and defeated. The prayer over, a new look 
was on the man’s face; but when the sermon was 
over, a new man walked out of the pew. Arm in 
arm, the two friends walked in silence to the ferry. 
The erstwhile recalcitrant was the first to speak. “I 
swear,” said he, “I believe I have been most egre- 
giously mistaken about that man.” “No proposition 
was ever clearer to me,” replied the other. “It don’t 
seem put on,” continued the first; “he seems to feel, 
and that deeply, everything he says.” The next Sun¬ 
day he requested an introduction to Mr. Beecher, 
heard him at every prayer meeting and preaching 
service during his stay in New York, and ever after¬ 
ward, though two thousand miles away, he would 
not permit an unsavory word against the preacher 
whose “influence was all gone.” But this is only 
typical of many cases. Families moving to New 


Henry Ward Beecher 151 

York and Brooklyn from afar, and acquainted with 
Beecher only through slanderous newspaper reports, 
first went to Plymouth Church as to a menagerie. 
In due time, however, the expulsive power of his 
personal charm claimed them as enthusiastic friends. 
Then it was that his old neighbors humorously 
shrugged their shoulders, heaved an awful sigh, and 
exclaimed : “What? They, too, bewitched? What a 
fearful influence that man does exert!” 

Like all men of the first order, Beecher the man 
was ever greater than his works. There are gifted 
men who are fully able to express themselves in their 
words and deeds; we somehow feel that their effects 
are easily as great as their causes; they lack the leo¬ 
nine strength of reserve power; they do not say: 
“What we have revealed to you is only a hint of 
the untapped energies lying behind.” But this is 
what Dantes and Coleridges and Beechers always 
say: “You think our Infernos and Conversations and 
Sermons are grand; but O, what New Paradisos yet 
unsung, what Ancient Mariners yet unborn, what 
Sermons yet undelivered!” Now, Beecher pos¬ 
sessed this unexplored, unexpressed self in a remark¬ 
able degree. Beecher never preached a sermon that 
was equal to Beecher. There was in him what David 
Swing characterized as an “inborn, vast genius”; 
what George William Curtis called “his exuberant 
vitality”; what John G. Whittier recognized as 


152 A Moneyless Magnate 

“warm, tender, and irresistibly attractive” ; what At- 
ticus G. Haygood termed “so creative a mind and 
fascinating power”; what Haweis named a com¬ 
pound of Spurgeon, Bright, Maurice, and Robert¬ 
son; what Richard Salter Storrs defined as “his 
power so constant and so vast, only because the 
sources of it were so manifold and so deep.” In 
other words, Beecher was just Beecher. He was a 
kind of human cube—the length and the breadth 
and the height of him are equal. Guthrie was called 
the silver-tongued and Chrysostom the golden¬ 
mouthed. Now, Beecher’s tongue was tipped with 
silver and his mouth was filled with gold; but the 
striking power of Beecher the organism is partly 
seen in this, as pointed out by a discriminating stu¬ 
dent : “He was never spoken of by his acquaintances 
as either a silver or a golden-tongued orator. It is 
not to disparage Guthrie or Chrysostom that each 
bears one of these appellations; but it is to indicate 
the wholeness and integral character of Mr. Beecher 
that his eloquence must be spoken of as an effluence 
of his entire nature rather than the superb activity 
of some particular power.” This phase of his char¬ 
acter bulks so large, and illustrates so emphatically 
one of his many sources of power, that it is difficult 
to leave it without further development. But a few 
words more on this point from one of his letters must 
be sufficient: “Only a few days more and we shall 


Henry Ward Beecher 153 

be on our way to Peekskill, where I will roll on the 
grass, frolic with the dogs, rejoice in the flowers, sit 
under the big pine tree and superintend laying 
out the road, and we will have a good time generally. 
But having had it I shall return to my church ready, 
happy and eager to resume my labors, and with a 
heart all the richer in love for it and my people for 
these few weeks of rest.” Any man who can tumble 
in the grass, play with dogs, dream with flowers, 
nod under a spreading tree, boss the building of a 
new road, have a good time generally, and can at 
the same time draw this epigram frotn the greatest 
English preacher of his time, who is comparing 
him with Mr. Gladstone: “When Mr. Beecher con¬ 
cludes it is rather out of deference to custom or con¬ 
venience than because the subject is exhausted”— 
that man, I say, has something—a vast, vital, inner 
opulence—which lifts him to the first rank of 
supreme personalities, nor is he unduly awkward in 
such high fellowship. 

Still, a man may have a personality as unique as 
Shakespeare himself, and yet fail as a Christian 
preacher. A great authority in such matters has 
gone so far as to assert that a man may even speak 
with the eloquence of men and of angels, have the 
gift of prophecy, know all mysteries and all knowl¬ 
edge, and yet, lacking love, he may be but a lone, in¬ 
flated cipher in the universe—simply nothing. Nor 


154 A Moneyless Magnate 

is it otherwise with Christian preaching. Until a 
personality, however great, is colored, saturated, 
soaked in the inmost essence of the truths of God, 
man, and the universe as declared in Christ, he shall 
not stand in the Congregation of the Evangelists of 
Eternity. The upperworld facts and forces must 
meet and mingle in his own being, forming a holy 
majesty of society within his possessed and pos¬ 
sessing personality, before he is that timeless, un¬ 
earthly, and uniquely distinctive personage named a 
Christian preacher. 

Here, then, we come upon the second secret of 
Beecher’s power. His themes were many and varied, 
but his ruling ideas were splendidly limited. Doctor 
Newell Dwight Hillis, who has made a careful 
analysis of Mr. Beecher’s seven hundred published 
sermons, collected out of fifty preaching years, and 
embracing doctrinal, philosophical, biographical, 
expositional, narrative and imaginative themes, tells 
me that Beecher’s dominant ideas are really four in 
number, viz., the Suffering Love of God, the Deity 
of Christ, the Sanctity of the Individual, and Man’s 
Immortality. Moreover, a critical study of his great 
predecessor has yielded Dr. Hillis this further con¬ 
clusion : Every three years Beecher went the round 
of Christian truth and experience, treating the great 
epochs of the Christian life and covering the great 
themes—God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Man, his dig- 


Henry Ward Beecher 155 

nity, his need, his ignorance and sinfulness, the 
nature, number, and order of the spiritual faculties, 
the method of quickening a sense of sin in men, the 
development of love, the growth of faith, and nour¬ 
ishing the hope of immortal life. 

Notwithstanding, therefore, Beecher’s variety of 
subjects and his myriad-minded treatment of them, 
I think that the contention that his overruling ideas, 
as given, is in the main just and true, and will be 
borne out by a comprehensive study of his sermons. 
It would be interesting and profitable to let Mr. 
Beecher speak upon his four regnant ideas for him¬ 
self; but at least two things forbid—the limitation 
of space and my utter inability to choose wisely from 
such riches.'' I used to visit a friend, a Maiden Lane 
jeweler, for the purpose of admiring his precious 
stones. As he put out a single tray of opals, I was 
not unduly excited; but as he went on setting case 
after case of flashing gems before me, insisting that 
I should drink in the beauty of all, I was so intoxi¬ 
cated by their luster as to become esthetically dizzy. 
Instead of saying, “This particular amethyst, or 
pearl, or opal, or diamond is beautiful,” I usually 
wound up with the prosaic statement: “It is time to 
go home.” So, it is not poverty but wealth—bound¬ 
less, amazing, overwhelming riches—that forbids 
our pulpit prince speaking for himself in this con¬ 
nection. Suffice it to say that the men in Christian 


156 A Moneyless Magnate 

history who have visioned a holy, loving, suffering, 
sympathetic God; who have understood and inter¬ 
preted the nature and mind of Christ; who have pro¬ 
claimed the sanctity of the individual; who have set 
ringing the sweet chimes of immortal hope in the 
hearts of men, equal to that of Henry Ward Beecher, 
are considerably less than the number of centuries 
which have come and gone since the angels sang 
above the Cradle in Bethlehem. Of Christ he said: 
“I put my soul into His care, even as when I was 
born, my father put me into the arms of my mother. 
He is the only God I know.” 


VIII 


Phillips Brooks 

I N searching out the foundations of the greatness 
of Phillips Brooks, we must reckon with his 
ancestry. For he nobly fulfilled the saying of 
Holmes, that a man, in order to be great, must select 
his parents two and a half centuries before his birth. 
On the Phillips side, we can trace Brooks’ ancestry 
back for nine generations. And they are a great 
people. We find in them a fine blending of thrift, 
uprightness, intellectualism, and spirituality. The 
eighth generation flowered out in the beauty of a 
character rarely equaled in the person of Mary Ann 
Phillips, the mother of Phillips Brooks. In spiritual 
passion and sacrificial devotion, she ranks with the 
great mothers of all time. In spiritual-mindedness, 
she recalls the mother of Saint Augustine, of John 
Wesley, of Horace Bushnell. “She had a deep in¬ 
terior life of the soul,” says Professor Allen, “whose 
phases were more real and vital than the phenomena 
of the passing world. . . . From his childhood to 
his death, the inexpressible tenderness of Phillips 

Brooks for his mother was one of the deepest char- 

157 


158 A Moneyless Magnate 

acteristics of his being, as her influence was one of 
the higher sources of his power.” 

For nine generations, also, we can trace the ances¬ 
tral stream of the Brooks family. On this side of 
the house there is, indeed, a different atmosphere. 
Negatively, there is an absence of predominant devo¬ 
tion to intellectual and spiritual ends. Positively, 
there is a prevailing tendency to practical affairs. 
They are men of business, men of patriotism, men 
of unflinching integrity. When, therefore, William 
Gray Brooks and Mary Ann Phillips were married 
in North Andover in 1833, there was the union of 
two strains of as pure, unadulterated Puritanism as 
perhaps ever commingled. And so it was into an 
unpretentious house, but a true Christian home, on 
High Street, Boston, that Phillips Brooks was born 
on December 13, 1835. We propose, in our study, 
to gather his life about the three periods measuring 
his wonderful career: First, the Period of Self- 
Discovery. Second, the Period of Unfoldment. 
Third, the Period of Ripening. 

1 

No matter what is revealed later on, one of the 
profoundly interesting periods of a great man’s life 
is that of self-discovery—those strange, mystic, awk¬ 
ward, aching years in which a boy of genius is trying 
to find himself. Like all healthy children at the age 


Phillips Brooks 159 

of three, we find baby Brooks wanting something. 
His father is away from home, and his mother 
writes: “Phillips says, ‘Tell Papa I have learned to 
use a fork,’ and wants you to bring him a red- 
handled knife and fork.” Red, by the way, con¬ 
tinued to be his favorite color through life. At four, 
he comes home from a private school crying. He 
explains the cause of his tears by saying the teacher 
had told him to write a composition on “The Ele¬ 
phant.” At seven, he writes a letter to his mother 
and signs it, “Your affectionate friend, Phillips 
Brooks.” About this time, there is a pencil story 
worth recalling. One night the boys were in the 
back parlor, with their slates and pencils, preparing 
lessons for the morrow. Phillips had a new pencil, 
which he continued to thrust further and further 
into his mouth. Finally, it went down his throat. 
He at once asked his mother what would be the 
result if any one swallowed a pencil. She told him 
that he would probably die. Phillips said nothing 
more. But nothing more was ever heard of the pen¬ 
cil, either. At eleven, he entered the Boston Latin 
School. He may not have been, at the outset, the 
best of students. For in his twelfth year, he wrote 
on a scrap of paper, which is still preserved as a 
precious document, the following resolution: “I, 
Phillips Brooks, do hereby promise, and pledge my¬ 
self to study, to the best of my ability.” It was in 


160 A Moneyless Magnate 

this Latin School that he received fine training in the 
classics. It was here, also, that he began to manifest 
that literary style, which is peculiarly his own, and 
which gives such distinctive power to his sermons 
and addresses. 

He was in his sixteenth year when he entered Har¬ 
vard College. His Harvard career shows that he 
had ability for genuine scholarship. Yet it also 
shows that he did not aspire to maintain high rank 
in his class. He stood fifth as a freshman, sixteenth 
as a sophomore, thirteenth as a junior, and sixty- 
sixth as a senior. He had no inclination for math¬ 
ematics, exhibited some taste for natural history, 
succeeded in chemistry, indifferently endured the 
natural sciences. He was, however, a true lover 
of history, especially in its biographical form. But 
he cared nothing for dry-as-dust historic facts as 
presented in the class-room. He despised elocution, 
because he thought that it begot self-consciousness. 
He maintained a high grade in intellectual philos¬ 
ophy, rhetoric, and logic. But there was one depart¬ 
ment in which he was the acknowledged leader, and 
that was the languages. He toyed with French, 
respected German, stood very high in Latin, and 
uniformly excelled in Greek. Now, his biographer 
sums up this phase of his career by saying that 
Brooks could have been what is technically known 
as a scholar. But “what stood in his way was his 


Phillips Brooks 161 

love of literature as the revelation of man, the 
yearning to enter into the deeper experiences of life, 
to know the world he lived in.” And yet, I think, it 
is not too much to say, in the light of his after 
development, that the very thing which stood in his 
way as an all-round scholar, was also the very thing 
which enabled Phillips Brooks to discover the person 
for whom he was searching—himself. For, like 
many another youth, deaf and dumb to mathematics 
and the natural sciences, the voice of the world’s 
supreme literature found a rich response in the 
depths of his being. He at once obeyed that voice, 
rose up and followed on to those shining heights, 
where he began to forever associate with the master 
spirits of the ages. 

But just what of a distinctly religious character 
was going on in the boy’s soul at this time, it is 
impossible to say. On both sides of the sea, the pre¬ 
vailing mood was one of religious doubt. We are 
told that in the nineteenth century religious faith 
and hope reached their lowest point. Matthew 
Arnold describes it as “the wandering between two 
worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” 
As Brooks failed to join the Church, though the 
proper age was “from sixteen upwards,” and though 
he knew that the consuming desire of his mother 
was to have him confirmed, it is possible that he 
was undergoing some inward religious struggle. 


162 A Moneyless Magnate 

After all, I confess that this is nothing more than 
inference. For, in studying Phillips Brooks, we 
must remember that from childhood to the day of 
his death, he scarcely ever shared with a human 
being, not even the mother whom he adored, those 
profound secrets of his inner life, which were known 
only to God and to his own soul. While simplicity 
was the key-word of his youth and manhood, his 
“was a character singularly complex despite its sim¬ 
plicity, a career wherein there were epochs and dis¬ 
tinct phases of development.” 

As we know, his first attempt to accomplish some¬ 
thing in practical life met with conspicuous failure. 
I refer to his brief career as a teacher in the Boston 
Latin School. I have a first and a secondary reason 
for explaining that failure. But I mention, in 
passing, only the secondary, which is this: The 
crowd of boys over which he was placed as teacher 
deserved the argument of a pugilist, rather than 
the classical refinement of the future preacher, fresh 
from college. Bare recital of a few tricks that class 
played upon the inexperienced young teacher will, 
I believe, enforce my conclusion. One boy threw a 
handful of shot into Brooks’ face. Looking around, 
the frustrated pedagogue saw an innocent-looking 
youth, holding up the very hand which had thrown 
the shot. But the young imp seemed to have been 
suddenly regenerated. For he was in the deferential 


Phillips Brooks 163 

attitude of one who wanted to make earnest inquiry 
concerning school work. Another lad plugged up 
the thermometer with snow. After the mercury had 
fallen below the freezing point, the rascals com¬ 
plained of the cold until the room, already hot, was 
made unbearable by piling more fuel upon the fire. 
“Then,” we are told, “the windows were thrown 
open and the opposite process begun, till the ther¬ 
mometer, reinforced with snow, called for a reversal 
of tactics.” After prayers one morning, he looked 
up and saw his boys bedecked with eyeglasses, made 
of strips of tin, filched from a neighboring tinshop. 
Then he discovered that he was locked in the room 
with that wicked class. He was also compelled to 
let a boy down from the window to the ground, at 
the same time beseeching him to remove the obstruc¬ 
tions from the plugged-up key-hole. Frankly, is it 
any wonder that Phillips Brooks failed as a teacher 
in the Boston Latin School ? 

But because this very failure as a teacher marks a 
crisis in his life, it must not be lightly considered. 
For the awful desperation, the unutterable despair, 
the untold agony he experienced during the six 
months following his resignation as a teacher—these 
are things which make one uncover in the presence 
of a soul endeavoring to understand its majesty and 
its mystery. He was at this time a chivalrous youth 
of twenty, possessed of a sensitiveness of nature but 


164 A Moneyless Magnate 

seldom paralleled, and handicapped by a reserve 
which was profound indeed. With radiant face and 
high ideals he had walked joyously up to the Palace 
of Life, rung the door-bell and waited for an answer. 
For a brief moment, a mystic door stood slightly ajar. 
Then an unseen hand rudely slammed it in his face, 
leaving him without in the deepening gloom. But 
it was while standing there in the vast gloom of 
his aching disappointment, that he visioned that 
Light which lighteth every man, coming into the 
world, heard a Voice sweet with the melody of an 
infinite music, beheld a Face he was to love and be 
loved by forever. It was now that he sought that 
true confessor of souls, President Walker, of Har¬ 
vard College. The details of that sacred interview 
were never given to the world. But we do know 
this: Doctor Walker advised Phillips Brooks to 
study for the ministry. Coming out from that inter¬ 
view, he was seen by a young tutor named Charles 
W. Eliot, who was on his way to Doctor Walker’s 
home. Eliot says the face of Brooks was of “a 
deathly whiteness, the evidence of some great crisis.” 
In 1881, our world-famous preacher called upon this 
same tutor, now president emeritus of Harvard Uni¬ 
versity, to decline the offer of a professorship. 
Again his face was strangely white, and President 
Eliot remembered the vision of 1856. 

On the eve of his departure for the seminary at 


Phillips Brooks 165 

Alexandria, Virginia, Phillips Brooks wrote these 
words in his journal: “As we pass from some ex¬ 
perience to some experiment, from a tried to an 
untried scene of life, it is as when we turn to a 
new page in a book we have never read before, but 
whose author we know and love and trust to give 
us on every page words of counsel and purity and 
strengthening virtue.” Now, I cannot stay to ana¬ 
lyze those three years in the seminary. Suffice it 
to say that many of his friends thought the coming 
great preacher was throwing his life away, and 
frankly told him so. Fortunately, as I have already 
said, Phillips Brooks was mothered by a true mother. 
She not only labored six sons into life—she also 
prayed six sons into the Kingdom of God. She, 
too, believed that her marvelous boy was throwing 
his life away. But he was throwing it away, she 
thought, only to find it again, multiplied an hundred¬ 
fold. She wrote: “Keep close to your Saviour, dear 
Philly, and remember the sacred vows that are 
upon you, and you will surely prosper.” Love-lyrics 
like this flowed from her mother-heart into the life 
of her noble son, until she ceased to walk with God 
here to abide at home with Him forever. 

That the change from Boston life to the seminary 
was a marked one, may be gathered from the young 
theologue’s letters, many of which abound in humor. 
On the day of his arrival at the seminary, he wrote 


166 A Moneyless Magnate 

that his lordly apartment was a garret in an old 
building called the Wilderness. Its furniture con¬ 
sisted of a bedstead and a washstand. He says: “I 
looked in, threw down my carpet bag, and ran.” 
Speaking of bedsteads, we recall that they were a 
bone of contention throughout his life, no matter 
in what part of the world he traveled. And it is 
only fair to say that the fault was not always with 
the bedstead. For Phillips Brooks, during almost 
two-thirds of his life, was six feet and four inches 
long. He says he escaped from bed once at an 
untimely hour because, to use his own words: “I 
could not stretch out straight or make the narrow 
bed clothes come over me.” He wrote from Athens: 
“The classic fleas fed on us through the dewy night.” 
We learn, also, that the seminary furniture and bill 
of fare were in perfect harmony. For he writes to 
his father: “Did you ever eat tomato pies? Well, 
they alternate with boiled rice, which is troubled 
with water on the brain, as our daily dessert.” 
Already allied to the spirit of progress, which was 
manifest throughout his career, he adds : “Last night 
a new dish made its appearance, which looked like a 
flapjack that had tried to be a loaf of brown bread 
and failed in the attempt.” 

Now, it was in the seminary that Brooks exhibited 
a capacity for scholarship, which had been somewhat 
lacking in college. From the graves of Greek and 


Phillips Brooks 167 

Latin, no longer dead languages to him, there flamed 
forth the resurrection power of new worlds of 
thought and experience. Entirely distinct from his 
class work, the scope, the variety, the strength of his 
reading at this time is nothing short of marvelous. 
Why, he reminds one of Macaulay, eating and 
digesting books as a ravenously hungry boy eats 
buckwheat cakes, whose blessed adhesion is assured 
by an abundant supply of delicious country butter, 
whose haunting flavor is far removed from the realm 
of probabilities by genuine soakings of pure maple 
syrup. And his notebooks show that he was not 
engaged in mere discursive reading, however wide. 
Rather, that the tremendous impact of the world’s 
thought had shaken the depths of his nature, that 
his very soul was being shaped into a kind of sensi¬ 
tized plate, which would in coming years photograph 
with exactness, fineness, and majesty, the life of 
God in man’s soul, and the life of man in history. It 
was at Alexandria, I think, that Phillips Brooks 
discovered himself. Through self-discovery he also 
discovered the master principle of his life-work, 
viz.: The principle which proclaims the eternal value 
of the human soul, revealed by the incarnation of 
God in Jesus Christ, and redeemed by the passion 
of God on Calvary. Having found his principle, he 
moved steadily forward in his own magnificent in¬ 
terpretation of it. He held that the human soul, in 


168 A Moneyless Magnate 

order to be loved, must be known. And it was for 
qualifying himself to interpret this truth to men, 
that he wandered up and down the highways of 
literature. “But wherever he went, from great writ¬ 
ers to those less known, heathen and Christian, 
ancient and modern, he never failed to extract judg¬ 
ments of value, unsuspected revelations of the 
beauty, the dignity, the greatness, the worth, of the 
human soul. ,, 

And, mark you, when Phillips Brooks, at the age 
of twenty-one, had discovered himself, he had done 
it forever. Of course he expanded, he broadened, 
he deepened, he heightened, he ripened. But it was 
only more of the same kind, rather than more of a 
different kind, of the stuff out of which great life and 
character are wrought. I think his words concern¬ 
ing John Henry Newman give keen insight into 
his own life. He said : “Newman was a remarkable 
man, by no means of the first-class, for he never got 
a final principle, nor showed a truly brave mind; 
but there was great beauty in his character, and his 
intellect was very subtle.” Now, his journals reveal 
that, fortunately for the world and for himself, 
Brooks got hold of final principles in his boyhood. 
For example : He believed in his boyhood that the 
Incarnation meant that God and man had met to¬ 
gether in the person of Christ, the fullness of God 
and the complete perfection of humanity; and he 


Phillips Brooks 169 

believed it always. Again: He believed in his boy¬ 
hood that Christ’s death on the cross was in some 
mysterious, organic way connected with the forgive¬ 
ness of guilty human sin; and he changed worlds 
with the same conviction. In a word, Brooks dis¬ 
covered in his youth the unity of life in Jesus 
Christ. And with increasing splendor, he preached 
“that all life is one great harmonic chorus, appealing 
to the individual soul to join in the universal strain.” 
Blessed is the man who discovers a final principle at 
life’s threshold rather than at life’s end! 

11 

Now, if I have dwelt overmuch on the formative 
years of Brooks, it is that we may approach the 
period of his unfoldment with a just appreciation 
of the backgrounds in which his life and ministry 
were cast. I believe no man ever came to his work 
with more thorough equipment. The subject of his 
first sermon was: “Christ as the Centralizing Power 
in the Spiritual Life.” The text is II. Cor. xi. 3: 
“The simplicity that is in Christ.” He afterwards 
said the sermon was a twofold failure—first, it was 
lacking in simplicity, and, second, it had nothing in 
it of Christ. Yet I think a study of the sermon will 
bear out Professor Allen’s statement that it has “the 
evidence of a marvelous maturity.” He was less 
than twenty-three when he wrote it, and still in his 


170 A Moneyless Magnate 

seminary course. But he strikes with masterful and 
prophetic power the truth that Christ is the center 
toward which all roads lead—“all truth, all reality, 
in whatever sphere manifested, in literature, art, or 
science, all the positive acquisitions of man in the 
long range of history, all great events and move¬ 
ments, have their affiliation with Christ.” 

This, then, was the style of preaching to which 
forty or fifty people were listening in the Sharon 
Mission, three miles from Alexandria, in 1858-59. 
One Sunday two strange faces were seen among the 
Virginia mountaineers. They were men who had 
come to hear and then to call Phillips Brooks to the 
Church of the Advent in Philadelphia. In July, 
1859, he preached his first sermons there, having 
agreed to supply the pulpit for three months. Many 
years afterwards, he playfully recalled an incident of 
those first weeks of ministerial experience. Walking 
home with a vestryman one Sunday evening, Brooks 
suggested that perhaps he had better not remain 
even for the three months. The vestryman gave 
him the chills by answering: “Well, as long as you 
have begun, you had better stay out the time for 
which you were hired.” 

However, he had been in the Church of the 
Advent only seven months, when he received a call 
from St. John’s Church, Cincinnati, at that time the 
largest and wealthiest Episcopal Church west of the 


Phillips Brooks 171 

Allegheny Mountains. At the beginning of his 
second year in the ministry, his fame had crossed the 
continent. He received urgent calls, extending from 
Newport to San Francisco. The little church on the 
corner of York Avenue and Buttonwood Street had 
become a veritable magnet, drawing people from all 
parts of the city. On Sunday evenings, the streets 
in the locality of the church were filled with car¬ 
riages. And lest the admiration of the Quaker City 
should spoil the darling of her heart, once again 
we hear his mother’s voice saying to the brilliant 
young preacher: “I had rather hear you praised for • 
holiness than for talent, though of course that is 
unspeakably precious when used in God’s service. 
But, my dear Philly, let no human praise make you 
proud, but be humble as the Master you serve, and 
never forget what an honor it is to be the servant 
of Christ.” Among the greatest ordination sermons 
ever preached in the history of the Christian Church, 
are the sermons preached by the mother of Phillips 
Brooks to Phillips Brooks himself! 

What, then, was the secret of this young physical, 
mental, and spiritual giant, whose ministry was now 
beginning to throb through the nation’s life? As 
this question was asked for over thirty years 
throughout the English-speaking world, I shall 
answer it in the words of the truest interpreter of 
Phillips Brooks: “The world was right in fastening 


172 A Moneyless Magnate 

upon his true and genuine manhood as his pre¬ 
dominant characteristic.” Back of all he said, back 
of all the wonderful manner in which he said it, 
stood his total manhood, all of his faculties unified 
in Christ, who “had taken him, as the sovereign 
harmony takes the wandering tone.” He believed 
that a man whose mind and heart are not working 
in unison gives no true, abiding light. Such a man, 
he said, is like a match which will not strike without 
the box; and you haven’t got the box. The world 
was saying then, as it has ever said, as it is saying 
today: “Remove first the obstacles which stand in 
the way of human progress, and then men will be 
able to live.” Young Phillips Brooks laid his ax 
at the root of this fallacious tree. He struck it hard 
blows, and his weapon had a keen edge. And while 
the decayed chips were falling all around him, he 
cried: “The world, humanity, has already been re¬ 
deemed by Christ. The opportunities of the divine 
sonship are open to every man. Live ! Live greatly 
now.” He gave us our greatest definition of preach¬ 
ing in three words. What is Christian preaching? 
He answered: “Truth through personality He 
defined liberty as “the genuine ability of a living 
creature to manifest its whole nature, and to be 
itself most unrestrainedly.” And truly, these defini¬ 
tions put on flesh and blood in the unfolding man¬ 
hood of this pulpit prodigy. “Now,” he cried, “here 


Phillips Brooks 173 

is a truly new conception of life: Man is something 
to be lighted, and to be obedient to the flame that 
illuminates him.” Do we wonder that the students 
of the University of Pennsylvania, coming out of 
the Church of the Holy Trinity on Sunday after¬ 
noons, imagined they beheld a rosy splendor on the 
face of the late afternoon sky? One of them says: 
“The very heavens were on fire, not because the sun 
was setting across the Schuylkill, but because the 
preacher had projected a light into the open sky 
of the heavens—the light of the mystic, the light of 
the prophet, the light which never was, on sea or 
land.” 

Here he was, then, at twenty-six, the most dis¬ 
cussed preacher in Philadelphia. Moreover, his in¬ 
fluence had broken the bounds of his parish and 
denomination, overflowing the city. He was not 
only the foremost preacher, but one of the Quaker 
City’s foremost citizens as well. Is there not some¬ 
thing strangely beautiful in beholding this brave 
youth, this clerical Sir Galahad, associating with 
men from all walks of life, old enough to be his 
father? And yet, there seemed nothing incongru¬ 
ous in such fellowship. While he held a high posi¬ 
tion and represented strong social influence, chiefly 
did these older men gather around him because his 
personality was simply invaluable. His “fascinat¬ 
ing eloquence gave a new and potent charm to the 


174 A Moneyless Magnate 

cause so dear to them.” And what was that cause? 
Why, the deathless cause of human freedom! Al¬ 
ready the black clouds of civil war were hovering 
over the land. Next to Abraham Lincoln, no soul 
felt a deeper dread than did the soul of Phillips 
Brooks, lest their unsheathed lightnings should 
blight and blast our national tree. And now it was 
that our White Knight’s soul seemed to expand into 
a vast cathedral, along whose invisible aisles he 
heard the tramp of a million feet, he heard the rain 
of bitter tears, he heard the sacrificial flow of the 
nation’s most precious blood. But from whose heav¬ 
enly dome he also heard the voice of the Lord God 
of the nations thundering: “Let my people go! Let 
my people go!” And when Phillips Brooks had 
heard that voice, this young idealist, this velvet- 
souled poet, this snow-hearted Saint John became 
an ancient Moses coming down from a modern Sinai, 
with the tables of God’s eternal law in his hands, 
with the music of God’s eternal truth in his heart, 
with the splendor of God’s eternal light in his face, 
and the people were afraid to come nigh him! 
Though he wist not, like Israel’s leader, that the skin 
of his face shone, none the less did he flame and 
flash like an incarnate Vesuvius! 

Now, Brooks was at this time exemplifying what 
had become the synthetic principle of his life- 
method. What was that principle? “The nature 


Phillips Brooks 175 

and source of power, how it was to be fed, how 
ideas and truths and beliefs were to be transmuted 
into power.” As of Jonathan Edwards, it is also 
true of Brooks: “There was in him something of 
the seer or prophet who beholds by direct vision 
what others know only by report.” He was richly 
endowed with the historical imagination, which 
enabled him to enter into the life of the race. And 
this, in turn, made it possible for the racial life to 
flow back into his own individual being. He ad¬ 
mired physical power wherever manifested—in 
worlds, in mountains, in seas, in men. It was one of 
his habits to stand as close as possible to the majes¬ 
tic rush of a giant locomotive, thundering onward 
with the great express train, as if it in some strange 
way reflected the power within him. When asked 
in later life what he would rather have been if he 
had not become a preacher, he answered: “I would 
like to have been the captain of a great ocean steamer, 
or, better than that, a young girl in her teens, awak¬ 
ening to the consciousness of her beauty, and with¬ 
out effort subjecting to her sway those who came 
into her presence.” 

But into the higher realms of power it was his 
ruling passion to go. He was always reading while 
traveling. Finishing a book, he threw it out of the 
car-window. “You might trace him in his journey- 
ings,” says his biographer, “by the trail of books.” 


176 A Moneyless Magnate 

He loved to meet and greet the spirit of the strong 
man wherever he trod the pathways of history. He 
claimed him for his elder brother, though he were 
Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shakespeare, Wesley, Ed¬ 
wards, Robertson, Bushnell, or Beecher. He pos¬ 
sessed an ingrained 1 admiration for power. Com¬ 
bined with his spiritual genius, this inborn admira¬ 
tion enabled him more fully to reincarnate the power 
of the Highest, which overshadowed and made him 
a moving tabernacle of power. Henry M. Stan¬ 
ley once heard Brooks preach. He confessed that it 
was not only the most rousing sermon he ever 
heard, but that it actually made him feel excited. 
He affirmed that, as a young man, such a sermon 
would have stirred him to action. This, then, was 
the man who stood in the Church of the Holy Trin¬ 
ity and spoke these words, which still burn like a 
subtle fire: “The devil of slavery had kissed the 
strong shoulders of the Republic, and the serpents 
sprung from his defiling lips were preying upon her 
life. It was agony to tear them off, but it was death 
to let them remain. Despite our anguish, we had 
taken courage to rid us of the abomination.” And 
then, while Lincoln’s dead body lay in the City of 
Brotherly Love, the scorching, raging fire of the 
prophet’s eloquence was subdued into the sobbing 
tones of the broken heart and the saint’s vision. He 
then said of the martyred President what men are 


Phillips Brooks 177 

saying still of the mighty preacher: “In him was 
vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the 
goodness of real greatness.” Thus, in those un¬ 
folding years, Shelley’s words best describe him: 

“All familiar things he touched, 

All common words he spoke, became 
Like forms and sounds of a diviner world.” 

hi 

Coming now to the period of his ripening, I am 
aware that you have already asked the question: 
“Why does he not say something about Phillips 
Brooks and Boston? For is not Phillips Brooks 
Boston, and is not Boston Phillips Brooks?” Now, 
your question is entirely valid. But it is well to 
remember that behind life’s foregrounds lie life’s 
backgrounds. What I mean is this: For Saint 
Augustine, the Milan garden lay behind the diocese 
of Hippo. For Chrysostom, the desert and the cave 
lay behind Constantinople. For Edwards, North¬ 
ampton lay behind Stockbridge and its deathless 
books. For Robertson, Winchester, Cheltenham, 
Heidelberg, and Oxford lay behind Brighton. For 
Maurice, Bubbenhall and King’s College lay behind 
Cambridge. For Liddon, Wantage lay behind Ox¬ 
ford and Saint Paul’s. For Beecher, Indianapolis 
lay behind Brooklyn. For Bushnell, New Haven 
lay behind Hartford. For Simpson, Greencastle 


178 A Moneyless Magnate 

lay behind the Episcopacy. For Matheson, Innel- 
len lay behind Edinburgh. And so, for Phillips 
Brooks, Cambridge, Alexandria, and Philadelphia 
lay behind Boston. Of his Boston ministry, I wish 
to speak of Brooks the preacher and the man. 

He was thirty-four years old when he went, as 
rector, to Trinity Church. I have not time to con¬ 
sider the struggle in his own soul, the anxiety of 
his father and the attendant sickness of his mother, 
because he refused the first call to come back to his 
boyhood home. And, finally, on his accepting the 
second invitation, how his own Church and the City 
of Philadelphia were fairly stunned, as if they had 
been the victims of some dire catastrophe, so deeply 
and intricately had he woven himself into the 
organic life of the community during his ten years 
there. It is not too much to say, however, that Bos¬ 
ton—the “Hub,” the immovable—was moved at his 
coming, and began to revolve around his ministry 
as have few cities in the history of Christian preach¬ 
ing. On Sunday, October 31, 1869, he preached his 
first sermons as rector of Trinity Church. His 
morning text was: “I must work the works of Him 
that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when 
no man can work.” His afternoon text was: “My 
meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to 
finish His work.” I recall the texts, because they 
are an index to the new power, they pitch the key 


Phillips Brooks 179 

of the new music, they suggest the new and deeper 
spiritual splendor now enfolding him, they strike a 
new note of passionate urgency, which increased in 
volume, depth, and grandeur for the next twenty- 
two years. 

Before he had become well settled, somebody— 
and I am half inclined to believe it was Almighty 
God—cleaned up his Boston parish by sweeping the 
old Church away with a broom of fire, that he 
might have a building in some sense adequate to 
his own greatness and majesty. I never enter the 
new Trinity Church, I scarcely ever think of it 
except as Phillips Brooks dressed up in the splendid 
clothing of that stately stone pile. And so, when 
this preacher-prophet, with his boundless hopeful¬ 
ness, with his exuberant vitality, with his mental 
and spiritual flame, swept like a holy, glowing radi¬ 
ance over Boston, what happened ? Why, all 
churches and creeds rose up at once to claim him. 
Unitarians said: “He belongs to us.” Baptists said: 
“He belongs to us.” Methodists said: “He belongs 
to us.” Presbyterians said: “He belongs to us.” 
Congregationalists said: “He belongs to us.” Prot¬ 
estant Episcopalians answered, with pardonable 
pride: “You are all mistaken, he belongs to us.” 
All of which, I think, is but another way of saying 
that Phillips Brooks belonged to no one denomina¬ 
tion. For the Lord of All anointed him and pre- 


180 A Moneyless Magnate 

sented him as a gift to the Universal Church of our 
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! 

Let us now examine some individual witnesses to 
the power of his preaching. One says: “As he is 
lifted by his theme into a rarefied atmosphere, and 
with a marvelous faith catches a glimpse of still 
higher summits to be reached, like a mountain 
climber, scaling from crag to crag, you are rapidly 
borne along with him, till the worries of earth look 
very trifling from the crest where he pauses.” An¬ 
other : “Out of twenty or more of his sermons which 
we have heard, there has not been one which would 
have been unsuitable for a revival meeting. What¬ 
ever the subject, the central thought is always the 
cross of Christ—the goodness of the Gospel to a sin¬ 
ful soul.” After hearing him preach in Grace Church, 
New York, in 1870, a writer in the New York 
Evening Post said: “He preaches the humanity of 
Channing with the creed of Jeremy Taylor, and 
strikes at the shirks and shams of our day with 
the dashing pluck and full blood of Martin Luther.” 
Principal Tulloch, after hearing him in Boston in 
1874, wrote to his wife: “I have just heard the 
most remarkable sermon I ever heard in my life (I 
use the word in no American sense) from Mr. Phil¬ 
lips Brooks, an Episcopal clergyman here: equal to 
the best of Frederick Robertson’s sermons, with a 
vigor and force of thought which he has not always. 


Phillips Brooks 181 

I never heard preaching like it, and you know how 
slow I am to praise preachers. So much thought 
and so much life combined; such a reach of mind, 
and such a depth and insight of soul. I was elec¬ 
trified. I could have got up and shouted/’ Dean 
Stanley once invited Brooks to preach in Westmin¬ 
ster Abbey on a Fourth of July, which fell on a 
Sunday. Many felt that Brooks had been asked to 
perform a difficult task. Stanley himself was by no 
means assured of the outcome, with such a red-hot 
American in such a pulpit on such a day. Happily, 
Lady Frances Baillie, a sister-in-law of Dean Stan¬ 
ley, has recalled an interesting incident connected 
with the service. Immediately after its close, she 
slipped into the deanery by the private door, reach¬ 
ing the drawing-room before any of the guests who 
were to come in from the abbey. She found Dean 
Stanley, with tears running down his face, a most 
extraordinary thing for him. On her appearance, 
he burst out with expressions of intensest admira¬ 
tion, saying: “I have never been so moved by any 
sermon that I can remember; and, oh, the wonderful 
taste and feeling of that passage at the end!” When 
asked how Brooks compared with the great preach¬ 
ers of Scotland, Professor A. B. Bruce replied: “It 
is this way: our great preachers take into the pulpit 
a bucket full or half full of the Word of God, and 
then, by the force of personal mechanism, they at- 


182 A Moneyless Magnate 

tempt to convey it to the congregation. But this man 
is just a great water main, attached to the ever¬ 
lasting reservoir of God’s truth and grace and love, 
and streams of life, by a heavenly gravitation, pour 
through him to refresh every weary soul.” I once 
said to Doctor David Gregg, himself a great 
preacher, and former pastor of the Lafayette Ave¬ 
nue Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn: “You knew 
Phillips Brooks: how did he impress you?” His 
face lit up as he made this answer: “I lived in the 
same block with him for several years. How did 
he impress me? Why, Brooks was big all over— 
big at the top, big at the bottom, big at the center— 
a towering physical, mental, and spiritual colossus.” 
Then, pausing a moment, he added, with charac¬ 
teristic discrimination: “The first thing that hap¬ 
pened to you after hearing Brooks finish a sermon 
was a kind of collapse, which was immediately fol¬ 
lowed by a majestic feeling of bigness in your own 
soul.” Ah! I do not wonder, when our White 
Knight visited Japan, the children shouted, as he 
was borne along the highways: “Look! There goes 
the image of the great Buddha!” Thus was he 
greatly unique, splendid, incomparable. As a 
preacher, Brooks can, of course, be imitated by no 
man. But what is far better, he is a fountain from 
which every man may drink, because he gives match¬ 
less expression to the vast undertones and over- 


Phillips Brooks 183 

tones of the human heart. For he believed and 
taught, with his twin brother in the spirit, Robert¬ 
son, of Brighton, that— 

. . . “All the past of time reveals 
A bridal dawn of thunder peals 
Wherever thought hath wedded fact.” 

But great as he was as a preacher, Phillips Brooks 
was even greater as a man. He was not an expert 
in aristocratic littlenesses, but he was a prince in 
manly nobilities. The late Doctor Weir Mitchell, 
not only a specialist in nervous diseases, but a spe¬ 
cialist also in his judgment of men, says: “I have 
known a number of men we call great—poets, states¬ 
men, soldiers—but Phillips Brooks was the only one 
I ever knew who seemed to be entirely great. I 
have seen him in many of the varied relations of 
life, and always he left with me a sense of the com¬ 
petent largeness of his nature.” After lecturing to 
the students of Andover, he closed by saying: “Let 
us pray.” One of the students told Bishop Law¬ 
rence that, praying from the same desk at which 
they had heard professors pray, Brooks “offered a 
prayer which, as compared with theirs, was so beauti¬ 
ful that he had to open his eyes to see how a man 
looked when he prayed like that.” A mother in 
Israel, ninety-three years of age, told me that she 
used to go to Boston once a year just to hear Phil¬ 
lips Brooks pray. She said he was even a “greater 


184 A Moneyless Magnate 

pray-er than a preacher.” A workingman once 
wrote him: “To me you reveal God as no other man 
does. What I mean by that is, I can’t think of you 
for ten consecutive minutes without forgetting all 
about you and thinking of God instead; and when I 
think of God and wonder how he will seem to me, 
it always comes round to trying to conceive of you 
enlarged infinitely in every way.” A woman who 
scrubbed the floors of Trinity Church asked him that 
her daughter might be married in the chapel. He 
said: “Why not take the Church?” “But that is not 
for the likes of me,” sighed the poor soul. Then 
Brooks towered like a mountain of celestial glory 
as he answered: “Oh, yes, it is, for the likes of you, 
and the likes of me, and the likes of every one. The 
rich people, when they get married, like to fling 
their money about. But, my dear woman, that is 
not necessary in order to be married at Trinity 
Church.” And the wedding took place in Trinity 
Church. The great organ was played, too, as if the 
bride’s rags had had the rustle of silk or broadcloth. 
And I doubt not that God’s angels looked on while 
God’s true priest made them man and wife. Two 
poor, ignorant Roman Catholic women lived in 
Salem. One was bemoaning the fact that her son 
had fallen into evil ways. Though neither had ever 
seen him, the other said to the sorrowing mother: 
“My friend, the thing for you to do is to take your 


Phillips Brooks 185 

boy to Phillips Brooks.” One Sunday morning, a 
dying colored girl sent for him through her sister. 
As he was then ready to enter Trinity pulpit, he 
sent his assistant, who explained why the rector could 
not come just then. The dying girl said: 'Then you 
go back and tell Phillips Brooks I won’t die until he 
comes.” And she didn’t die, either, not until he had 
come and administered the Holy Communion! On 
a Christmas morning, Brooks watched from his win¬ 
dow a street urchin, who was having great fun ring¬ 
ing door-bells, and then running away before any 
one could open the door. When the lad reached 
the rectory and rang the bell, the preacher, who had 
concealed himself in readiness, at once opened the 
door. For a moment the boy stood speechless at 
such an unexpected revelation of avoirdupois and 
kindly, beaming countenance. Finding his tongue 
at last, he said: “Why, is that you, Phipps Brooks?” 
He treasured this as one of the finest tributes he ever 
received. He was touched to tears to think that a 
homeless, ragged, little child should take his name 
upon his innocent lips as if it were a household word, 
as if it were as natural as to greet the morning sun 
and say: "You are God’s dear gift to the world.” 

And now I must bring to a close this imperfect 
interpretation. So many things have been inade¬ 
quately said. So many things, also, remain unsaid. 
Brooks’ life was not an unbroken flow of joy. No 


186 A Moneyless Magnate 

truly great life is, or can be. He was ofttimes a 
lonely man. He never married. But he adored one 
woman—his mother! Sometimes he was misunder¬ 
stood. Once he was publicly hissed in an Episcopal 
Convention. But he always carried the heart of a 
child, the purity of a saint, and the greatness of a 
great Christian. I never saw him in the flesh. But 
I have often seen him in the spirit. Many years 
ago, while sitting as a boy under a Kentucky apple 
tree in midsummer, I saw the picture of his noble 
face for the first time. To me, he began that day 
to make manhood majestic. Ah! his manhood was 
so magnificent that it dwindled skyscrapers into 
atoms and compressed worlds into the dimensions 
of marbles! He blinded the devil of envy by the 
splendor of his smile. He made love captivating. 
He made virtue beautiful and bewitching. He made 
faith natural. He made goodness contagious. He 
made religion vital. He made spirit, soul, and 
body unite in his own imperial nature, until he be¬ 
came a walking melody inspiring the lives of men. 
He made the Fatherhood of God more winsome than 
the bosoms of all the mothers who have labored all 
the children of men into life. He made the Saviour- 
hood of Christ Jesus mean more to the soul than 
the sun means to the day. He made the reality 
of the Holy Spirit, the ever-present Comforter, 
Strengthened and Illuminator, to be more sweet and 


Phillips Brooks 187 

lovely than any lovely song. I know you will for¬ 
give me for saying that I shall always be glad that 
I first met Phillips Brooks under an apple tree. And 
some day, please God, I expect to meet him again 
under the Tree of Life. If I do, it will not be far 
from the throne of white and the river of crystal. 
Then will I thank him for showing me, in the years 
of earth and time, to better love and serve the Lord 
and Master of us all. Just six months before he 
died, out there on the ship plowing the great deep, 
he wrote his dear song called, 'The Waiting City.” 
One time I remember well the song refreshed my 
soul with its delicious sweetness. I was walking 
at the dark end of the day. I was also out in the 
vast open spaces of being. My feet were on the 
meadow and my dreams had stolen in behind the 
stars. I was saying over and over again those golden 
words of George Borrow: "The wind is on the 
heather, brother: life is sweet.” I looked up, and 
the evening star threw its silver kisses right down 
into my face. I looked back, and the full-orbed 
moon shot its old lustrous glory right across my 
path. I looked up, and out, and around, and yonder, 
underneath the evening star and the full moon, lay 
a many-colored sea, whose amber, violet, hyacinthine 
waves washed all the shores of night. I thought the 
musical color-sea was chanting a requiem for the 
dead sunset. It was then and there that Brooks' 


188 A Moneyless Magnate 

song stole into my heart like a rhythm of unearthly 
peace. Then I repeated it aloud. But as its melody 
went drifting down the winds of sunset, it did not 
fail to leave a holy hush in my soul. Written on the 
bosom of the tumbling deep, “The Waiting City” 
has none of the ocean’s storm. But it has much of 
Heaven’s deep, sweet, inner calm: 

“A city throned upon the height behold, 

Wherein no foot of man as yet has trod; 

The City of Man’s Life fulfilled in God. 

Bathed all in light, with open gates of gold, 

Perfect the City is in tower and street; 

And there a Palace for each mortal waits, 
Complete and perfect, at whose outer gates 
An Angel stands its occupant to greet. 

Still shine, O patient City on the height, 

The while our race in hut and hovel dwells. 

It hears the music of thy heavenly bells 
And its dull soul is haunted by thy light. 

Lo, once the Son of Man hath heard thy call 
And the dear Christ hath claimed thee for us all.” 

Within half a year after writing the song, Phillips 
Brooks entered “The Waiting City.” I shall always 
be glad that he left the dear earth for the dearer 
Heaven just at dawn. As morning came, he went. 
Not many hours before his death the servants found 
him, his mind wandering, climbing the stairs leading 
from his own room to the topmost story of the rec¬ 
tory. Asked where he was going, he replied: “I am 
going home!” O, beautiful, glorious, fulfilled 


Phillips Brooks 189 

prophecy! For with the breaking of that very dawn 
he went home, and— 

“Never to the mansions where the mighty rest, 
Since their foundation came a nobler guest/’ 

Yes; thanks be unto God the Father, God the Son, 
and God the Holy Ghost—that ineffable Trinity 
whose unspeakable glories he preached so match¬ 
lessly—thanks be unto the Great Three in One: 

“He died when dawn was sweeping o’er the land, 
When morning glories lit the gleaming wall; 

And one who watched him, holding his worn hand, 
Whispered: ‘Alas! that he should miss it all!’ 

The early sun, risen from his dark night, 

Flamed his great banners when he went away; 

And one said: ‘Lo! at coming of the light 

He hath gone forth and lost the beauteous day!’ 

But our White Knight, from mortal house of pain 
Gladly released, went singing to God’s place, 

And cried, ‘Dear Lord, after the bleak world-rain, 
I cannot bear the splendor of Thy Face!’ ” 


% 


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